Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, Germany/France/UK/ USA , 2011, 110 mins
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Logan Lerman, Matthew Macfadyen
Review by Carol Allen
When you review films regularly, it’s always pleasant to have one’s negative expectations confounded. What I expected from this film was that it would be a run of the mill, remake costume drama tarted up with 3D. What it actually is however is a cheeky, witty, exuberant, action packed and beautifully made piece of entertainment.
Made in Germany by the UK team of producer Jeremy Bolt and writer/director Anderson, makers of Event Horizon andResident Evil, and with American backing, the film successfully melds its many elements, including Andrew Davies’s wit and writing skills and Anderson’s action film expertise into a stylish and original movie.
From the very beginning the combination of style and action is established with the use of models and toy soldiers to set the historical scene (a motif which is used sparingly and elegantly throughout) followed by the introduction of the three musketeers – Athos (Macfadyen), who emerges from a Venetian canal like a seventeenth century Robocop, Aramis (Luke Evans), whose entrance has echoes of Spiderman and Porthos (Ray Stevenson), who’s the battling brawn. Their mission is to steal from the Doge’s palace Da Vinci’s design for the first air ship. Assisting them in their task is Athos’s beloved, the Milady ((Jovovich), an athletic and resourceful young woman, who successfully negotiates the ingenious security arrangements protecting the treasure, then double crosses the trio and changes sides, thus breaking Athos’s heart.
Based perhaps a touch loosely on Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel, the story is about young d’Artagnan (Lerman), who joins forces with the now disenchanted trio of musketeers and puts new heart into them, as they battle together to protect the young king of France against the manipulative Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), who is plotting to take over the reins of power, the duplicitous Milady, and the caddish English Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom).
The settings are glorious – the vaulted gold halls of the royal palace, stunning aerial views of old Paris, which skilfully useCGI and 3D to give a delightful story book look to the vista – and Anderson directs the film at a good pace without losing any of the subtleties and wit of the script, which has a fun, camp humour and delightful, deliberate anachronisms, such Aramis acting as a seventeenth century traffic warden and giving d’Artagnan a ticket for an equine infringement of the regulations. And the world’s first airship – an old style galleon powered by a Zeppelin style balloon above – is a design delight.
The performances are good, including Freddie Fox and Juno Temple , both touchingly naïve as the young King Louis and his doll like queen, although Lerman as d’Artagnan and Gabriella Wild as his love interest are somewhat bland. The fight sequences, of which there are many, are though full blooded and imaginatively staged and as a piece of movie entertainment this has everything you could hope for in an action costume drama plus an originality which is all its own. And it is enormous fun.
The coda at the end of the film appears to promise a sequel, which there may well be, as I suspect this film is going to be a big success and anyway Bold and Anderson are big on sequels – there’s yet another Resident Evil movie in the pipeline. I sort of hope there won’t be a Three Musketeers II though, as I doubt if it could better this original.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
