Christoph Waltz and Orlando Bloom star in "The Three Musketeers."
Forget that old school book. The Three Musketeers -- the latest of umpteen versions of the Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D'Artagnan saga -- owes more to Pirates of the Caribbean than to Alexandre Dumas.
That is to say, it reinvents the 17th Century as the 21st with funny hats, larding over a lot of silliness with noise and explosions. Even the swordfights are more Matrix than Musketeers, with bullet-time slo-mo and martial arts moves. All in 3D.
What, you expected something different from the man behind the Resident Evil series?
It isn't the first Musketeers movie to take the subject utterly unseriously.
Richard Lester did that with wit in the '70s. But, while throwing out everything about the story (and period accuracy) that displeases him, Paul W.S. Anderson doesn't bring anything to the party except bombast.
This will be forever known as the Musketeers movie with airships (and rotating-cannon 'Gatling guns'). But as bizarrely anachronistic as it all is, ridiculously out-of-time FX is not The Three Musketeers' problem. It's the people.
Let's start with the accents. This movie's Porthos, Ray Stevenson of the mini-series Rome, joked in an interview that an American playing Caesar would "make it sound like cheap porn." In this movie, D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) has an American accent (reminiscent of Christian Slater's actually).
The scheming Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich) occasionally lets her mid-Atlantic accent slip and California-by-way-of-Serbia slips in. The French sound British (Brit actors Stevenson, Luke Davis and Matthew Macfayden are the Musketeers). The British sound REALLY British (Orlando Bloom plays a full-out evil Lord Buckingham who sports a Snideley Whiplash moustache). And the only guy with a French accent is Danish (Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Rochefort, the lethal henchman to Christoph Waltz's Cardinal Richelieu).
Add a lot of "yeps" and lines like "I bet you say that to all the girls" and you have a movie that doesn't even pretend to care that it takes place almost 400 years ago.
Does that matter? It wouldn't if there was a Johnny Depp to galvanize the doofus-ness.
Ideally that job should fall to whoever plays D'Artagnan, the sword-savvy country boy who joins the Musketeers. Unfortunately, Lerman (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief) is a good head shorter than his fellows, and, looking about 12, doesn't physically pull it off. (The Musketeers themselves, consummate pros all, keep up a steady attitude of bemusement).
So the job of action anti-hero falls to the director's wife Jovovich (also of Resident Evil), the first Milady in history who could kick 10 guys' butts around the block and carve her initials in them in the deal.
Airships aside, the germ of the story remains -- including D'Artagnan's welcome-to-Paris misunderstanding that leads to a schedule of hourly duels with the Musketeers. There's the Queen (Juno Temple), whose stolen jewels provide evidence of adultery against her beloved-fop King Louis (Freddie Fox). (The theft, BTW, is straight out of Mission Impossible, with silken threads standing in for motion-detecting lasers.)
And there's a musketeer mission to London to rescue said jewels, followed by, ahem, an airship dogfight over the English Channel.
It all makes for a bizarre, jaw-dropping experience -- and not in a good way.
