The Three Musketeers (Two Stars)

U.S.: Paul W. S. Anderson, 2011

Tous pour un, un pour tous.

Alexandre Dumas pere

“The Three Musketeers” — Alexandre Dumas’ quintessential swashbuckling adventure tale of three crack swordsmen and lusty comrades (Athos, Porthos and Aramis) and the hothead/country bumpkin (D’Artganan) whom they befriend and help turn into a world-class, sword-slashing, heart-stealing hero in the 17^th century French court of Louis the effete 13th — has been filmed so many times (more than 40, according to the indefatigable IMDB) that you’d think by now they‘d know how to do it.

Certainly director Richard Lester (and writer George MacDonald Fraser) showed most of the way in their splendid and madly enjoyable 70s film-and-sequel The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (1973-4), with Michael York as D’Artagnan and Oliver Reed (Sir Carol’s hell-raising nephew), Frank Finlay (Olivier’s Iago) and Richard Chamberlain (Dr. Kildare) as Athos, Porthos and Aramis. (And Charlton Heston as the wily Cardinal Richelieu, Raquel Welch as a prat-falling Constance, and Faye Dunaway as the murderous Milady).

There have been rowdy, likable entertainments made of Dumas’ classic before, with Doug Fairbanks or his great admirer Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan (1921 and 1948), not to mention the 1939 Allan Dwan-directed romp with Don Ameche as D’Art and The Ritz Brothers as the Three Musketeers (or their counterfeits). Or Walt Disney‘s Mickey Donald and Goofy: The Three Musketeers. Or the little-seen versions from Argentina and Egypt. Or such almost certainly horrible examples of botching the book as Barbie and the Three Musketeers, Zorro and the Three Musketeers and The Sex Adventures of the Three Musketeers — a deranged-sounding movie that may have given new meaning to the Musketeers’ famous motto, “All for One and one for all!” (Or is it “One for all and all for one?”)

Shouldn’t they have gotten all the mistakes out of their system by now with “The Three Musketeers?” Learned what works and what doesn’t?

Non! Non! Non! This new version has an estimable screenwriter: Andrew Davies of the Colin Firth–Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice and other great British novel TV and movie adaptations. It has an offbeat choice for director: Paul W. S. Anderson of the bizarre pop actioners Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat and Death Race. And it has a cast that’s at least interesting (if not particularly good). Yet this flabbergasting movie quickly zooms to heights of almost drunken excess and rampaging foolishness.

Anderson’s Three Musketeers opens with triple intro-teasers of the title trio, in a series of semi-James Bond scenes, set in Venice and top-heavy with super-mechanical gadgetry and weird armour and sadistic jokes that seem to belong in a 17^th century Goldfinger. Then he gives us an anachronistic villainess Milady (roguish-eyed Milla Jovovich, looking as if she‘d rather be Lara Croft and acting like Catwoman in queenly finery), a fairly good but wasted Three Musketeers ensemble (Matthew Macfadyen as an urbane but troubled Athos, Ray Stevenson as a staunch Porthos and Luke Evans as an elegant Aramis), and one of the worst D‘Artagnans ever: teen dream Logan Lerman (of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief), who plays the role as if Paris and Versailles were big fratboy parties.

Then the mincing Louis XIII (Freddie Fox) shows up, followed by his flirty queen (Juno Temple), her girlish maid Constance (Gabriella Wilde), the sinister Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen, channeling Christopher Lee), the newly villanous Buckingham (Orlando Bloom, glam-hamming it up), and, of course, the wily Richelieu, played by Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds, who supplies most of the theatrical style this show has to offer.

By the time the Musketeers and D’Artagnan are in full gear, tring to outrace Richelieu’s crew, and speed the Queen‘s diamonds back to Versailles, battling the bad guys over the English channel in a combination giant dirigible and full-masted flying galleon supposedly designed by Leonardo Da Vinci, a super-vessel that looks like Monty Python on morphine, the movie has gone beyond sanity into full-blown howling nonsense and what seems an Errol Flynn Sea Hawk-inspired booze nightmare. And since these are the kind of moviemakers who wouldn’t put a flying galleon in the air unless they could ram and crash it into a palace, a cathedral or at least an art gallery, you know what to expect.

 “Although I work and seldom cease,” wrote our gal Dorothy Parker, “At Dumas pere and Duman fils./ I really can not make me care, for Duman fils and Dumas pere.” (“Fils” rhymes with “fleece,“ for you non-Francophiles or non-Parkerites.)

I don’t agree. I like Dumas, bestseller factory though he may have been, and I’ve enjoyed his deathless, fraternal, breathless adventure classic ever since I first read a version of it it in the Classics Illustrated series at nine or so. But Ms. Parker’s witty contempt might have been warranted had she stumbled into this movie and taken a gander at that galleon and got an eyeful of Milady Milla and watched Freddie Fox‘s Louis swishbuckling away and saw frat boy D‘Artagnan fence on the airship’s beam with the rotten Rochefort. (Where are the Ritz Brothers when you really need them?)

Not a good show. But the movie is so damned outlandish it entertains you every once in a while through sheer unabashed nuttiness. Not very often though. But not your typical Three Musketeers, in any case. Non, non, non, mes amis! Tous pour tous. Un pour un. As we say (sometimes) in the Left Bank, while dueling with the villainous dogs of Cardinal Christoph, “Dumb for all and All for dumb!” (Or is it “All for dumb, and dumb for all?”)

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