The Three Musketeers (2011)
It's Boring Action vs. Charmless Heroes in the epic smackdown of unlikeability we all didn't want to encounter.
The Three Musketeers appeared the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and the latter is a masterpiece by comparison.
Pirates 3, for example, has jokes. It has a fun Hans Zimmer soundtrack. But most importantly, the much-derided third Pirates movie stars Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush and a bunch of other watchable, likeable movie actors. It’s amazing what this can do for a movie, more movies should try it. You’d think it would be easy to find three or four leads who could generate some charm in a close-up and redeem the ill-will a terrible, obvious script and terrible, hackneyed set pieces and terrible, gluey romance are bound to generate in the terribly maltreated viewer.
In a fascinating confluence, however—the only thing about this film one could possibly call fascinating—Three Musketeers misses even the lowest bar, that of putting people who are fun to watch onscreen. It is a movie which begs you to check your phone, do your laundry, or otherwise engage with anything that isn’t what’s happening—so to speak—on the screen. It may seem an oxymoron to say something can be aggressively uninteresting, but I am a survivor: this film assaulted me with boredom. It’s difficult to imagine even the director paying attention to this. One gets the impresson that despite its large budget and impressive locations, nobody was ever behind the camera.
Nor, for that matter, in front of it, for this film stars the true paragon of facelessness, that icon of inertia, Logan Lerman. Having never read nor seen any adaptation of the Alexander Dumas classic, I do not have any idea of what the D’Artagnan character is supposed to be like. This rendition of the character is perfect for me, because he isn’t anything. Lerman’s “acting” as D’Artagnan really drives home the old theorem that acting is reacting, because Lerman cannot act, and D’Artagnan doesn’t react to anything. The movie forces him through the beats of a typical ingenue action hero, but D’Artagnan never seems to know what he should be doing. He gets mad when nobody has provoked him, smiles when least appropriate, and seems more bemused than excited when called upon to fight. He’s a cookie-cutter hero, but if the cookie-cutter was making shapes in Play-Doh.
This unoriginality is in keeping with the style. Not this movie’s style—it doesn’t have one of those—but the style of the films from which this flick is cribbing at every second. Important intertexts for Three Musketeers include not only Pirates of the Caribbean but also National Treasure and Assassin’s Creed video games. Apparently, any property built on pseudo-history was a reference point. This film’s reimagining of 17th century France is historically inaccurate…at its best moments. At its worst moments, the film makes a mockery of the very idea that there could be a country called “France.” Christoph Waltz’s Cardinal Richelieu would be the most offensive representation of a Frenchmen the world had ever seen—if the world had bothered to see this, which it collectively didn’t.
Assisting Waltz in this feature-length bowdlerization of France’s culture and people are the three OG Musketeers, Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans), and Porthos (Ray Stevenson), whose personalities are on full display in the film’s cold open. We see each infiltrate this castle in their own way. Luke Evans enters leaping from the rooftops, steals a gondola, and goes full Assassin’s Creep on a lady therein. Porthos allows himself to be taken prisoner, but escapes with his great strength. Athos, however, scuba-dives in—yes, this adaptation of Dumas has 17th-century SCUBA in the first three minutes—and promptly runs into, and kisses, Milady (Milla Jovovich).
Admittedly, Jovovich does what she’s asked to do in this. That is, she wears necklines several stories below her clavicle and occasionally dance-fights like a discount-store version of Trinity from The Matrix, except that instead of PVC pants she wears voluptuous taffeta ballgowns, some of which tear away to reveal weapons, because she is…..a super-secret agent?! Apparently. A treacherous enigma, Milady also has a superpower: she has no internal logic whatsoever. She can act for or against any character at any time, sometimes helping the heroes, sometimes betraying them for the blackhats, always with the same vaguely knowing smile, as if this was all part of the plan, as if her actions now do not completely contradict her actions 10 minutes ago. The first of her numerous betrayals leaves the musketeers nearly dead, thus opening the door for D’Artagnan to enter and redeem them, “One Year Later.”
D’Artagnan, in the manner of all likeable young heroes, sets out to become a musketeer and immediately picks several fights with people who did nothing wrong, going out of his way to be a massive dick to the entire citizenry of Paris. Among those he offends is a deeply disinvested Mads Mikkelsen as “Rochefort,” the Cardinal’s enforcer. Just you wait for the emotional catharsis of their duel at the end.
Moreover, D’Artagnan picks fights with all three of the Musketeers. This is where the movie’s lack of effort really comes into focus. The heroes all meet D’Artagnan through pure happenstance, and then, rather than fighting him, team up with him—because who cares? Nobody took time to even pretend there was a sequence of events which caused this to happen; it just happens because the movie needs it to happen. There are many moments when characters will appear in a place with no justification of how they are there, or accomplish enormous plot points unseen by the audience. In one wildly confusing sequence, D’Artagnan is captured, only to be bailed out by the Musketeers, who have stolen an airship completely offscreen. How they accomplished this is handwaved away by saying D’Artagnan was “the decoy.”
However, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the incoherent plot matters very little. This is because it is at all moments firmly overshadowed by a much more glaring problem: the dialogue. The film made the understandable choice to eschew period-appropriate dialect…but not consistently. Aramis still talks like a character on Merlin, while Athos mostly sounds like a frustrated junior college adjunct. Milady speaks more formally, but is totally American. Multiplying this confusion is the fact that some actors are trying much harder than others. Occasionally, a scene will harmoniously blend the terrible writing with terrible performances such that what emerges is anti-immersive, even Brechtian:
Milady: You plan to put them in his personal vault, the most secure location in all of England….The Tower of London!
Cardinal Richelieu: Yup.
Cardinal Richelieu, poignant as ever. I wonder what other monosyllabic responses in the affirmative could have fit here?
Milady: You plan to put them in his personal vault, the most secure location in all of England….The Tower of London!
Cardinal Richelieu: Sure.
Or,
Milady: You plan to put them in his personal vault, the most secure location in all of England….The Tower of London!
Cardinal Richelieu: Sick.
Or,
Milady: You plan to put them in his personal vault, the most secure location in all of England….The Tower of London!
Cardinal Richelieu: Bet.
Or,
Milady: You plan to put them in his personal vault, the most secure location in all of England….The Tower of London!
Cardinal Richelieu: Dope.
Waltz, a great actor, absolutely deserves the flack I’m giving him; this is an awful performance which fails to Go Big when clearly that is the thing to do in a flick like this. That being said, other actors really are trying, and do no better.
While it’s truly hard to compete with the world-class quipster D’Artagnan—
Athos: Are you ready to meet your maker?
D’Artagnan: I have other appointments.
Athos: You’ll miss them, I’m afraid.
D’Artagnan: Well, I’ll try my best to be on time.
—as the movie continues it becomes clear that among our heroes, Porthos is supposed to be The Funny One, and you have to feel bad for Ray Stevenson. Being The Funny One is a curse in a movie like this. When the audience is bored—which it is in this case—any attempt to inject humor falls flat on its metaphorical face. Stevenson is saddled with dialogue which….I tried various invectives here, but none of them seemed to capture the situation. Words fail me. Behold:
Porthos [speaking to D’Artagnan]: What would you like to put on your headstone? Little shit?
Later in the same scene:
“New plan. Kill the boy, kick their asses, then let’s go have lunch. I could do with some exercise.”
While the Musketeers quickly forgive D’Artagnan’s indiscretions and team up with him, the audience ends up wishing they had offed him. Will nobody rid us of this troublesome twerp? Later on, the Four Muskies have been taken into the service of the French king. On the subject of exploring Paris, Porthos suavely informs him,
“The women of Paris are complicated. They have a thousand ways of saying no, and only some of them mean yes.”
Well, sexual harassment charge incoming.
The plot is driven by the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu, who advises the doofus Dauphin. He has a plan to drive England and France into conflict which somehow involves planting the Queen’s jewels on Buckingham, the evil evil English duke played by Orlando Bloom. This character has no personality, but to emphasize how terrifying he is, characters hilariously exclaim “Buckingham!” every time he enters, as if he were the Spanish Inquisition. The only active party for nearly an hour is Milady, who first betrays the Muskies, then Buckingham, then Richelieu, then Buckingham again, and then the Muskies again. Milady makes no sense as a character, but boy is she busy.
The Musketeers put Richelieu’s plan in jeopardy, but, tough for him, the king likes them. Richelieu’s frustration at being stuck with the Musketeers strangely mirrors the audience’s frustration that the Musketeers are stuck grounded at Versailles. For about twenty minutes, the entire movie is about D’Artagnan becoming chums with the king. Both morons, they get along great. The king wants to impress the queen, and the queen likes our dear Muskies. As she eloquently puts it:
“I hope you won’t be too harsh with them. After all, boys will be boys.”
The action finally picks up when Milady absconds with the queen’s jewels. If you’re wondering whether there is an Entrapment-esque, dodge-the-lasers-to-steal-the-thing scene, there is (yes we’re still in 17th century France, why do you ask?). But now Buckingham, possessed of an airship, is threatening something or other, and the Musketeers are dispatched on a Mission Impossible to England to retrieve the all-important jewels. Excited, Porthos busts out another sage remark:
“I imagine English women are a lot like an iced bottle of champagne: frosty on the outside, but when you warm them up….”
….What? They’re carbonated? They explode?
Confusion will carry us right to the end. Not because there are any plot developments, really, but because you keep inadvertently tuning out. Even the third act hijinks, which involve airships, flamethrowers, 17th century machine guns, and several sword fights, somehow barely register. Leading the Boring Charge is Athos; his disinterest is so palpable that he makes kissing Milla Jovovich seem like a chore. Maybe he’s bored because he’s seen Pirates of the Caribbean too many times, and recognizes an artless copyjob when he sees one. Rochefort (Mikkelsen) reenters the movie with redoubled disinvestment and a bigger, badder airship—a thrilling twist no movie has ever done before—to threaten D’Artagnan’s ladylove, leading D’Artagnan to sacrifice himself. The ensuing airship battle is quite long; longer than several Duolingo lessons, as I discovered when I finally looked up.
D’Artagnan and Rochefort duel it out atop Versailles, and D’Artagnan shows us he’s no match for Rochefort, until suddenly, he is (as is traditional with movie heroes). I will take this opportunity to remark that in this film all the heroes’ swords are poisoned with something extremely fast-acting—being poked with one results in instant death, a la Hamlet, but only if you are a villain. It’s a very specific poison. As he deals the killing blow, Logan Lerman displays his acting prowess by delivering an iconic final line:
“You should have apologized to my horse!”
This emotional catharsis was so potent that I missed what happened next—I didn’t have a good angle on the TV from where I was rolling on the floor.
The film basically ends with the Musketeers delivering their pledge: All for One, One for All. I say “basically” because a moment later they also say Shut Up, which is very emblematic of the movie. Even the movie finds the movie tiresome, and can’t wait for it to be over. Despite the best efforts of some fabulous costumes, which out-act the actors, Three Musketeers takes what is presumably a fun classic—again, I haven’t read it—and turns it into a slog. Better performances could have saved it, but also better iceberg maps could have saved the Titanic. This movie’s problems are so thorough and run so deep that its difficult to even imagine how it could have worked. Fortunately, we don’t have to imagine it, because Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
“I imagine English women are a lot like an iced bottle of champagne: frosty on the outside, but when you warm them up….”
They taste worse??? Their value goes down???? Sodden with condensation?? hahaha