Avis Metacritic

A mish-mash of accents (buffoonish Depardieu's French, somber Irons' British, and DiCaprio and Malkovich carrying the same voices they use for every project) are vaguely unsettling, and there seems to be too little swashbuckling for characters who are synonymous with the term.

An unusually sober and serious-minded telling of Alexandre Dumas' classic tale, this handsome costumer is routinely made and comes up rather short in boisterous excitement.

Wallace, unfortunately, writes lazy, anachronistic dialogue, and the picture is abysmally shot (by Peter Suschitzky), with a prosaic, low-budget look that never allows you to experience the enraptured majesty of a fairy-tale historical setting.

Beyond its persistent coarseness, Wallace's story often trades yesterday's inspiration (Dumas) for today's (Simpson-Bruckheimer).

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

The only other adaptations I've seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven't read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story's central narrative premise.

Going down with the Titanic was a picnic compared to what Leonardo DiCaprio has to weather (an Alice in Wonderland hairdo, for starters) as Louis XIV in this unwittingly nutso adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1850 novel.

There is nothing worth getting steamed over or particularly excited about.

This dopey swashbuckler offers little action but lashings of DiCaprio's soft, hairless flesh.

This new chronicle of the adventures of the king's musketeers, as directed by Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace, suffers from a severe case of over-earnestness and star-power overkill.