It's Dumas, Idiot, Not Dumb-Ass!

The Three Musketeers author Alexandre Dumas would be rolling in his grave, not to mention the legion of purists Dumas fans, if he ever got to see hackmeister Paul WS Anderson's loose adaptation of his novel. It still retains the fun and the epic sweep of that adventure tale but it's now been instilled with unashamedly contemporary characterisations, bullshit slow motion action sequences and a jolly large dose of steampunk. Coming from the director of Resident Evil, Soldier and Death Race this turn to the dumb is not at all surprising although the end result is, if I'm honest, for despite it being filled with flaws from top to bottom, the 2011 version is very much a guilty pleasure movie.

First the bad news. The musketeers themselves are good, but not great. Ray Stevenson, Matthew MacFadyen and Luke Evans are all fine in their distinctly different roles, but they're too subdued...not quite embracing the daft spirit of the film. Logan Lerman is OK as D'Artagnan, but he's only about a 15% improvement over the shaggy haired Hayden Christensen model from Revenge Of The Sith. Oh, and it's got James Corden in it.
The other truly weak point is the mass of very obvious, poorly rendered CGI environments that clutter the movie. Like the main cast, they're fine and are never, ever offensively bad...but you can't help but think that another hour of render time might have made things a bit more convincing.

Everything else is fine. Milla Jovovich steals the show as a sultry assassin, Madds Mikkelsen is as suitably menacing as Gabriella Wilde is pretty, Christoph Waltz is far too good for this kind of thing and Orlando Bloom is clearly having a ball hamming it up as the Duke Of Buckingham. It's got scale and a big enough budget behind it to back it up, the story is well paced and structured and there are some memorable sequences along the way to hold the attention.

What makes this work is the tone. Unlike other Paul WS Anderson efforts that take themselves far too seriously, Musketeers knows it's absolute, 100%, pure, undiluted bullshit and it revels in the frothy, fun, unrealistic, over the top situations and occurrences. It may not what is considered a 'good' movie by any ones standards and I couldn't defend it with any great passion, but it is very entertaining and for that I salute it!