Moschettieri del re - La penultima missione

Italian revisitation of the Musketeers tale. Taken for what it is and not seriously, it's a fun movie with really good actors and comedic times that work perfectly. Too bad the characters are badly developed, there's really no one to emphatize with and the story abruptly ends with a dishonest and unnecessary twist. After that, you think about all the movie and you realize that suddenly nothing really makes sense. Plus, Favino is an incredible actor, but his character talking half italian and half french/spanish (the accent is really that confusing) is really hard to endure. Definitely a missed opportunity to do something different.

I stumbled across the Italian comedy film "Moschettieri del re" by accident (in its Russian dub) and actually enjoyed it a good deal; as a native English-speaker watching it in Russian(!) I was obviously missing out on any finer points in the script and wasn't in a position to judge the quality or delivery of the original Italian dialogue, but I thought it worked.

The humour isn't exactly subtle -- one ongoing theme is the smell of pigs that clings to d'Artagnan's clothing and person, for example -- but, crucially, it's not annoying. There is nothing worse than attempted laughs that grate horribly on the viewer, and the comedy here is by and large good-humoured and in keeping with the characters as established, e.g. The running gag about d'Artagnan's horses. And the balance of humour and actual emotion/adventure is right; this isn't pure spoof, and when Aramis loses his temper over the others' unkind 'experiments' on their superpowered mute sidekick and walks out, for example, the breach is painful and palpable.

Yes, they do have a superpowered mute side-kick... And sunglasses (for no reason other than to provide an eye-catching image for the promotional poster, I think), and gadgets (which they also don't use), all of which are given out in a deliberate Bond-homage scene. The side-kick, however, plays quite an important role, occupying more or less the position of Planchet in the various adaptations where the Musketeers have a single knockabout servant between them, and eventually acquires a name and -- in a tear-jerking scene that's treated pretty much as genuine angst apart from its inherent absurdity -- an honorary rank.

All the actors do well, taking their comic roles seriously. I think the reason why the film worked for me is that in many ways the aged-up characters are played quite straight; they bicker, they get into embarrassing scrapes (and out of them), and they are larger than life, but they aren't being deliberately debunked and they aren't portrayed as stupid... as opposed to occasionally wilfully obtuse! This is a comedy adventure and not a send-up, and it has touching moments in addition to the pure slapstick, plus some decently entertaining dialogue. There's a genuine sense of relationship between the characters, and overall it has been made with evident affection towards the original as well as an appreciation of its absurdities -- and, to be honest, I think any successful adaptation of "The Three Musketeers" pretty much *has* to be done with a side-helping of lively humour, or it just becomes a tedious string of fights and set-piece action sequences.

And I felt that the 'Wizard of Oz'-style ending (where all the characters are revealed to have their 'real-world' counterparts) does actually work quite well in terms of justifying the inconsistencies and zany aspects of the rest of the film. The fact that, for one thing, nobody ever gets round to telling the musketeers precisely what their 'mission' is, or deciphering the secret map. Milady's miraculous youth and transformation. The switch in tone when it comes to the fate of the Servant. And, arguably, the somewhat childish nature of much of the amusement...

This film doesn't really have a plot -- beyond the opening gambit of "The Musketeers reunite thirty years later" -- but there is a reason for that. Meanwhile it's a series of episodic adventures towards an unknown end, in the spirit of an ongoing serial or soap opera. It has a decent Athos, which is always a selling-point so far as I am concerned, even if he does have a face like Toby Jones :-p The characters are well-defined and remain consistent to the updated versions of themselves that have been established, and I particularly liked the direction in which the older Aramis was developed here. I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did; I gather it picked up a few awards on its original release, and I can see why.