PlanecrazyIkarus

Watched about 50 minutes' worth of this, then gave up. Watching this feels like watching some students' short film projects, stuck together. Lots of footage, using lots of shiny postproduction effects, very little dialogue, lots of really, really stilted, mediocre, drama school type acting, and (for the most part) no sense of a plot at all. Oh, and lots of unimpressive fight scenes that seem entirely pointless and stretch the length of the film without making it any more exciting.

It's the sort of pretentious nonsense that the most pretentious student in the film production class might produce in their final year to impress their most pretentious tutor - only this is hours and hours and hours of it. (Well, an hour and 40 minutes, I think. As I said, I only go 50 minutes through before losing patience).

In short: entertainment value: zero.

But it's got a few neat visuals.

The Three Musketeers must be one of the most filmed stories of all time. It seems like major movie adaptations now happen every 5 years, and major TV adaptations at a similar pace.

So, the last big movie adaptation was all about wire-fu. Why has it been filmed again? The advent of 3D. Apparently, every new fad in Hollywood must immediately be followed by a 3 musketeers film "reimagining" the old story by applying the new fad. There is also a hint of steampunk about this - but the historical setting far predates the steam age, so instead we get a bit of nonsense about Leonardo Da Vinci and airships. (Leonardo, by the way, drew schemata for heavier than air flying craft, and tanks. Not, as far as I recall, lighter than air craft)

So, how does this movie fare? The plot is roughly the same as in the last few adaptations I've seen (I never read the book: I read Count of Monte Christo, found it a bit too heavy on the religiousness, and didn't muster the energy to read 3 Musketeers). Except, this time around, Buckingham is a villain. (Orlando Bloom, being as uncharismatic as ever)

The action is competent enough - lots of CG, Milla Jovovich gets to leap around in period dress instead of combat gear or scifi rubber, and the traps in this film are about as close to scifi Resident Evil / heist movie type traps as they could get away with. The fencing, meanwhile, plays second or third fiddle to the big CG action setpieces, so don't expect anything too old fashioned.

But the dialogue... well, it's stolen. My ears kept detecting line after line and after a while, I started realising that this film had the gall to pretty much steal half its dialogue from previous musketeer films and other sources. At some point, a character uses an Oscar Wilde line. I would not be surprised if it turned out that the script does not contain a single line of original writing. Even the jokes from previous movies are stolen (D'Artagnan's insistence that a character apologises to his horse, for example). When not grating your ears with stolen dialogue, the film allows far too much screen time to a third rate British comedian / sidekick (James Corden?) who is probably the most annoying thing in the entire film.

The other actors, meanwhile, manage to strut around on screen while failing to produce even the slightest hint at on-screen chemistry, instead delivering line after line in their blandest ever performances. Even Christoph Waltz doesn't try to steal the show, which says a lot. (Will he ever be cast as a non-psychopathic character? He was charismatic in Inglorious Basterds, but now, he's been flogging that horse for a while...). Meanwhile, this particular incarnation of Constanze is even more underwhelming than Mena Suvari's effort in the last Musketeer film I've seen - and that says a lot.

So, plagiarised dialogue, bland performances, visually pretty CG action that is mindbogglingly silly... On the whole, that all sounds rather bad. And (in a Top Gear-esque revelation), it is. It's also reasonably watchable if you can totally switch off your brain and focus all your attention on Athos, who is the only actor/character projecting even the slightest hint of charisma in this entire soulless endeavour. Paul Anderson should probably stick to futuristic stuff and zombie movies - for Resident Evil, the slick visuals can, in combination with a thumping soundtrack, be enough to make fairly soulless films enjoyable. (And, to be fair, zombie scifi video game adaptations are a genre where a certain degree of cold, by-the-numbers film making is perfectly acceptable and expected). But the Three Musketeers? No, that story has been done with so much more gusto and passion in the past, any new adaptation should really dazzle more than just the eyes...

PS: Milady? Seriously? Sounds more like a name for a dog than a name for a character. Then again, this film credits some character names as "Blonde" and "Cougar", so I suppose naming the female lead "Milady" is not out of line with that sort of approach to the female gender...