Paul Anderson's new film of The Three Musketeers puts the familiar story in a wacko "steampunk" world. Photo Credit: Constantin Film, http://www.threemusketeers-movie.com/
Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D’Artagnan — we’ve been given yet another film version of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, and this time it’s in 3D. The film follows the plot of the Dumas classic. A young D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) must join the musketeers Porthos (Ray Stevenson), Athos (Matthew MacFadyen) and Aramis (Luke Evans) to stop a war between England and France precipitated by Athos’s former lover Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich) and the cunning Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). There’s a twist, though, in how the plot is acted out — Director Paul W S Anderson (of Resident Evil fame) has chosen to set the film in an imaginary steampunk era with flying galleons and tonnes of arcane gadgetry to make the most of what the 3D experience has to offer.
So far, you can probably tell that literary buffs and lovers of the original may have a little bit of difficulty adapting to Anderson’s vision, but it’s not just the bookish that dislike Musketeers. Viewing figures have been disappointingly low and the critics have ganged up to pan this latest in a long line of adaptations. Here’s what some have to say:
The “worst” Musketeers ever. Philip French at The Observer hated the film, he called it “stolid” and opined that, despite the heavily wrought aesthetic, “only Christoph Waltz’s Cardinal Richelieu has any style.”
“Exasperatingly slapdash.” Though The Daily Telegraph’s Robbie Collin said The Three Musketeers is “more fun” than The Pirates of the Caribbean 3, he marvelled at the pointlessness of some of the movie’s scenes. Furthermore, he sniped that the script “hasn’t been written with a tin ear so much as an entire tin head.”
A guilty pleasure. Empire’s Dan Jolin dissed the film for its plagiaristic script, Lerman’s performance (he’s a “smug, charmless little creep”) and the fact that the film is “absolutely, intensely and resolutely daft.” Still, he admitted, he “enjoyed this” and even says he’d “look forward to a sequel.”
