Nobody in their right mind wants to have to go to Montecasino, that temple of the degraded imaginary, at 9am on a Sunday morning. But that’s what had to be done if I was to review the new version of The Three Musketeers.
It was frankly surreal to arrive at the casino-slash-shopping-centre so early on a Sunday and find it filled with Bok supporters in their green-and-yellow shirts, most of whom seemed to be wandering disconsolately (the Boks had lost) around the fake cobbled streets of Montecasino, under its painted skies, and with a sort of zombied-out glaze in their eyes, probably because they’d been up since dawn to catch the game.
By comparison, but perhaps only by comparison, the new Musketeers movie was pretty engaging. Director Paul WS Anderson, known for his computer-game adaptations (Resident Evil I to XLVII or thereabouts), has said that his version follows the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas père faithfully, and apparently he said so with a straight face, but he has in fact steampunked it up bigtime and preserved only the broadest outlines of the tale as first told.
Steampunk is the genre or style in which we are to imagine that inhabitants of the 17th century, for instance, possessed retro-technology somewhat like the kind of thing we have today, or have had in the last century or so, except it is not powered by electricity but by some kind of highly sophisticated clockwork machinery.
There’s a quick joke in the film acknowledging this, and then it gets on with a lot of action involving anachronistic weaponry and the like, from flamethrowers (with bellows) to massive dirigibles and even rays of light that look not a little like lasers.
For Anderson has actioned up the Musketeers tale, too, which is a good idea if you are to make the story appealing to Generation XBox. There are swordfights as well as all the other malarkey, and the combatants do a lot of acrobatic wire work, meaning they move like the characters in wuxia, those stylised Chinese martial-arts movies.
Revisiting and revising
When Milla Jovovich, playing double agent Milady de Winter, encounters the aforementioned laser-type rays, she twists and somersaults through them very much like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment; when she has to fly down the side of a building, assisted by her clockwork technology, she must first take off her extravagant gown, naturally, and perform this action sequence in her 17th-century underwear.
Much of this kind of thing is laughable, but that doesn’t make it inappropriate for an update of an old story. Dumas’s book has been adapted to the screen many, many times; the first movie version was in 1903, and there were three or four adaptations in the silent era alone.
Since then, we’ve had Gene Kelly making of his Musketeer an absurdly graceful action star — swordfighting as dance. Richard Lester, working from excellent scripts by George Macdonald Fraser of Flashman fame, made three Musketeers movies (and it’s an outrage that the third, The Return of the Musketeers, isn’t available on DVD).
More recently, we’ve had a version with a pre-drug-dementia Charlie Sheen (1993) and a version with supermodel Justin Chambers as junior Musketeer D’Artagnan and Catherine Deneuve as Queen Anne (2001); there was, too, a rather good take on The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), a later Dumas tale in which the Musketeers (now a foursome) feature significantly.
There have even been, for heaven’s sake, a musical version, an animated version, and of course the famed straight-to-video German cartoon Barbie and the Three Musketeers — as well as, lest we forget, a porno redaction, Sex Adventures of the Three Musketeers (also German).
If the Kelly version prefigures the weightless wire work of the action in Anderson’s version, then the Lester movies provide Anderson with some key characterological notes. Porthos, for instance, the beefiest of the Musketeers, was played by Oliver Reed in the Lester movies, and an ongoing joke was made of the fact that he kept losing his sword mid-fight and had to make use of whichever poles, barrels or foodstuffs came to hand. So too, in Anderson’s version, Porthos is a lusty roustabout with the same irregular fighting techniques.
After a quick prelude in which the original Three Musketeers fumble an important mission, Anderson’s movie jumps a decade to the advent of the young Gascon hothead, D’Artagnan, and his arrival in Paris. Within a short time he’s scraping with the remaining trio of semi-retired Musketeers (and the villain Rochefort).
A few rousing swordfights later, the foursome are on a mission to save France from certain war with England. They’re up against the aforementioned Milady and a scheming Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), but of course courage, virtue and patriotism must triumph in the end.
Mixing and matching
How you take the steampunk elements and the wuxia-style action will depend on your taste for these things; I rather liked them, silly though they often are. The voices in the film constitute a veritable United Nations General Assembly of accents, but Anderson keeps the action moving, and the script has a decent number of funny lines, while the whole is garnished with some offbeat costumery — the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), for instance, seems to have discovered the pompadour hairdo earlier than hitherto revealed in the history books.
Of course a key part of making a Musketeers movie work is distinguishing and rounding out the characters of the Musketeers themselves.
I found Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan a bit too fresh-faced and wide-eyed: he looks about 15, and way too young to be running about with swords and stuff, besides his apparently not having yet grown a personality. But he’s okay in the context (and Lerman is in fact 19). The Athos-Porthos-Aramis trio has more character; Athos (Matthew Macfadyen) is the bitter cynic, Porthos (Ray Anderson) the party guy, and Aramis (Luke Evans) the priestly intellectual. Macfadyen looked rather uncomfortable, perhaps because of the reddish wig he is lumbered with, but Anderson and Evans do very well.
Jovovich’s Milady is a double-crossing bitch here, but she’s not as evil as the original Milady, and Jovovich is obviously an old hand at this kind of action. (She’s also Anderson’s wife.) Waltz as Richelieu has the right machiavellian silkiness, and filling his work space with chess pieces and model warriors is a neat idea. Freddie Fox as King Louis XIII is amusingly airheaded, but Gabriella Wilde as D’Artagnan’s love interest, Constance, appears to have been patched in from Barbie and the Three Musketeers. (Nothing, unfortunately, from Sex Adventures of …)
Seriously silly
The computer-generated environments look very cartoony, but one can live with that. Perhaps they are more impressive in the 3D version of the film. (To the disappointment of some sugar-deranged children at the preview, we saw it in 2D.) Ways of doing such CGI cheaply, playing with animated maps and so on, seem to have been borrowed from the altogether tougher TV series Game of Thrones.
Anderson’s Three Musketeers is hardly a masterpeice, and you’d be excused for finding that its various sillinesses overwhelm any plausibility it may have. It certainly doesn’t trump the Lester movies, which I think are still the definitive cinema adaptations, garlanded as they are with the unique Lester black humour.
Anderson’s movie doesn’t even outdo the Kelly danceathon, but then few nowadays go for classic dance moves.
It is not to be taken seriously, this version of The Three Musketeers, but it is fun in a preposterous sort of way. More fun, anyway, than watching a losing Boks game at dawn.