seriousfic

This movie just never ends up being more than the sum of its parts, even though the parts are quite good. Just take a look at the Musketeers! Gabriel Bryne, Jeffrey Irons, John Malkovich, and Gerard Depardieu, although by their accents, only Gerard Depardieu’s Porthos hails from the French part of France.

Okay, plot. Basically, this is a sequel to every Three Musketeers movie ever made, with the titular characters now older and wiser (except for Porthos, natch). D'Artagnan has become leader of the Musketeers, Aramais has become a priest, Athos has become a widower, and Porthos is still whoring and drinking, only now he has erectile dysfunction (this would be the comic relief, you see). Oh, and there’s a new king, played by a fresh-off-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio. He actually does a pretty good job, both with the spoiled and vile King Louis and with his wan, child-like twin brother.

Now Louis is a total pill, doing stuff like executing Hugh Laurie (monster!) and pulling a King David on Athos’s son so he can get with Athos’s son’s honey. Well, that’s the last straw as far as our guys are concerned, and they set out to replace Louis with his twin.

The problem is, they got the writer of Braveheart to both write and direct. There, his self-serious style worked – it was a story about murder, rape, rebellion, and martyrdom. Here… it’s a Musketeer movie. You expect a bit of a light touch, not to mention some action. You know, buckles being swashed, derring being done? For a pretty long period of the movie, our heroes are being hunted, yet never once do they make an escape in the nick of time. Similarly, they bust someone out of prison using a fat-suit and when the time comes to take out Louis, they play mind games by flashing copies of the eponymous mask at him. That’s right, the Three Musketeers are playing mind games. What’s next, is Batman going to beat Catwoman with a Super-Soaker?

Now, given that at this point in the story, Louis has become obsessed with Christine, Athos’s would-be daughter-in-law, couldn’t they have used her to set a trap for him, a trap involving swordplay? It would’ve been a nice feminist moment and let us know what Athos’s son saw in her, since otherwise all she does is hear her lover gets killed and then fall into bed with the villain.

I’ve been trying to sum up why this movie just misses working for me, even though it has a good cast, a good plot, and I don't much mine the occasionally narmy dialogue (at one point Leonardo DiCaprio is forced to announce "I wear the mask, the mask does not wear me."). What I came up with is that it’s not a Musketeers adventure, it’s a Musketeers family drama.