The 3 D Musketeers

dir: Paul W. S. Anderson

You might ask yourself: why would you voluntarily see a movie that you know can’t be good? You might specifically ask me: Why would you, a person of moderate intelligence who thinks every movie made by Paul W.S Anderson is shite of the highest order, see another flick made by him, especially one that seems like the dumbest thing since someone passed a law allowing children to legally own guns?

It would be a good question. It’s not one I have a satisfactory answer for. I’ve hated this shmuck’s flicks for decades, and his flicks are definitely not improving.

But an opportunity presented itself, and so I watched it.

Historians and philosophers, centuries from now, if there are people still around then, and let’s hope they’re not, will wonder if this is the dumbest version of the Three Musketeers story, or if it’s the awesomest. Rivalries will angry up the blood. Factions will form. Lines will be crossed. Feelings will be hurt.

It’s a prelude to the war to come, you see. The two sides will eventually meet in a war to expunge the earth of those they perceive as their blood enemies, without all realising the deepest, most saddening and salient fact: it doesn’t matter, because both sides are right and both sides are wrong, simultaneously.

The Three Musketeers might be an old story written by Alexandre Dumas centuries ago, but surely he, rolling around in his musty grave, was hanging for the moment whereby the story could be rendered in eye-popping 3D? Surely all he wanted was that a film version be made that demanded the 3D surcharge for those ill-fitting glasses that work about as well as a granite condom, and that finally has the technology to add CGI airships to his ye olde story of swordplay and derring-do?

And Orlando Bloom. Surely he was imagining Orlando Bloom when he was writing it 170 years or so ago. Who wasn’t dreaming about an actor as handsome and as terrible at acting as Orlando Bloom back in the 1840s?

The Three Dee Musketeers mostly follows the traditional story, insofar as it covers the story of young, poor D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) travelling from Gascony to the big city in order to join the Musketeers like his father before him. Of course, the lesser known bits of Dumas’s story is that the original story really should have opened with an action set piece where the Musketeers Athos (Mathew Macfadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans) murder a bunch of guards in order to enter a secret Leonardo da Vinci blueprint library to steal the plans for airships. You know, a ship, like a big fucking wooden ship, with a giant balloon on top.

Really? I mean, really? Regardless of how fundamentally, profoundly idiotic this is, it shouldn’t really matter, should it? The Musketeers are betrayed by Athos’s girlfriend Milady (Milla Jovovich), who sells them out to a smirking, preening, bouffant-sporting Buckingham (Orlando Bloom).

Time passes, and the Musketeers’ main enemy Cardinal Richelieu (Christophe Waltz), has left them harried and without favour in the present court. The current king, Louis XIII is a foppish dandy (Freddie Fox), easily manipulated and easier to distract. He is but putty in the hands of an arch mastermind like his Red Eminence.

D’Artagnan stumbles around causing trouble with his girlish good looks and his arrogance, believing himself to be anyone’s equal with a blade. Being a hick, this means he should have been killed fairly easily within the movie’s first quarter, but he somehow makes it to Paris without getting mutilated too badly. Of course, when he stumbles across a guy named after the stinkiest of cheeses, being Rochefort (I know the cheese is called Roquefort, but an awful cheese by any other name…), he really should have been killed immediately, rendering this a short movie instead.

And we all would have been spared the sight of Pirates of the Caribbean in the sky. But since when have movies or the universe itself ever been fair? Not since the Big Bang, I’d hazard a guess…

In Paris, D’Artagnan manages to meet and offend all of the Musketeers individually, agreeing to fight them all collectively. Lucky, they are then attacked by the Cardinal’s guards, who are incompetent with their blades. Not like our heroic swordsmen, oh no. They make short work of those chumps, they bond, and then everything should be fine. Athos is all gloomy and dark, still smarting over his betrayal at Milady’s hands, and, presumably, vagina. Porthos doesn’t give a fuck about anything apart from acting all lusty and fiddling with his moustache’s curly tips. Aramis is the priestly sort, who conveys a benediction upon those he kills, and just looks so dreamy while doing it.

So D’Artagnan, with his hairstyle that even Justin Bieber would mock, is left to be the young, romantic one. He crushes on one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, who’s a snooty and mechanical sort. She plays some ridiculously crucial part in the plot that has to do with Richelieu, sporting a pageboy cut that made me want to reach into the 3D screen and slap him, Milady, some diamonds, and Buckingham, all meant to bring Richelieu to supreme power.

To do all this, or prevent all this, the Musketeers fight, D’Artagnan vows revenge on Rochefort for being one-eyed and stinky, and fucking airships fight in the air in ways so silly and so not only in contradiction with history and reality and physics that the very fabric of time, space and taste threaten to tear apart at the seams.

And tear apart they do. What else could these aspects of reality do in the hands of a superhack like Paul W.S. Anderson? He even works in a reference to his own movies, being a proto-version of the laser security defence scene from Resident Evil. When a decent director does it, you smile or stroke your chin or both, if you’re lucky. When Anderson does it, you grimace and say, in your best Scottish brogue “Get thee fook…”

As much of a hack as Anderson is, this flick is pretty much all that you can expect from people trying to ape the POTC movies, and who can blame them for such a sub-standard product? If people are compelled (by greed) to cookie-cut a design as flawed as that, do you blame the end result, or the primary design?

Look, lament all I might, I didn’t actually hate the experience of watching this flick. As stupid as the underlying violation of Dumas’s legacy might be, some, if not a lot of the scenes actually work for what they are. I actually enjoyed the swordfights and such, and thought the climactic one on the roof of the Notre Dame was actually very well done. I love Mads Mikkelson in a lot of other flicks, not so much here as Rochefort, but it was great seeing him duelling with D’Artagnan from apse to flying buttress, from transept to narthex. Not that I cared about the result, because it’s not like I cared about any of the characters, but I do like action, and especially sword-type stuff.

The action is dealt with well enough, more than well enough, and who really cares about the plot? I’ve seen so many versions of this story that I no longer care how it’s rendered, despite how much I love some of the earlier versions (not including the one that has goddamn Charlie Sheen in it). There’s an energy to the idiocy on display which I appreciated (not to say that I enjoyed it at all times, per se), and, ultimately, whether it makes any real-world sense is irrelevant. For what it is, it certainly is it, whatever that ‘it’ is, which will differ from person to person. For some, like the Pirates flicks, it’ll be an amusement park ride. For others, in one’s best Sideshow Mel voice, it’s a Bemusement Park ride of toxic food, lethal entertainments and deviant carnies everywhere. With Orlando Bloom dripping sexually ambiguous menace over everything as the capper.

And for once, Bloom doesn’t give the worst performance in a flick. He should run home and tell Miranda Kerr I said that. She’ll be chuffed, I imagine.

Dumb is as dumb does, and I can’t pretend that my critical faculties were all working at the time. I watched it stone cold sober, and it’s probably not a flick that benefits from that, and yet I still got some perverse enjoyment out of it.

Watch it at your peril. If they make a sequel, I insist they call it Four Double Dee Musketeers, so that at least there’s the prospect of someone having an eye out at some midnight screening. That would be something to look forward to.

6 times this flick is less steampunk and more energised by the eternal power of perpetual stupidity that animates the universe out of 10

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“They walked arm in arm, occupying the whole width of the street and taking in every Musketeer they met, so that in the end it became a triumphal march. The heart of D’Artagnan swam in delirium; he marched between Athos and Porthos, pressing them tenderly” – that sounds like more than brotherly love to me – The Three Musketeers