Plot: The hot-headed young D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) joins forces with three rogue Musketeers (Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson) in this reboot of Alexandre Dumas’ story. They must stop the evil Richlieu (Christoph Waltz) and face off with Buckingham (Orlando Bloom) and the treacherous Milady (Milla Jovovich). The action adventure is given a state of the art update in 3-D.
What we thought of the show: Right from the beginning we knew it would be an entertaining film. Paul WS Anderson’s efficient digital re-working of Alexander Dumas’s tale of seventeenth-century heroism and the King’s original body guards, the Musketeers would definitely have its fair share of thrills and spills. However, skeptics be warned.. if you have always wanted a 3-D big screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers from the director of Resident Evil: Afterlife, then fair enough. But if you like your Musketeers just the way they are in the classic story then, you need to decide for yourselves if Paul Anderson has not gone too far. We found the movie entertaining enough, and we particularly liked the swashbuckling sword play of the 3 musketeers, except for D’Artagnan, whom we though fought like a sissy. It lacked credibility unlike the other 3 hero’s of a bygone era, who once were valiant protectors of the King.
The story line does somewhat stick to the original one with Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan, a energetic, cocky youngster in 18th Century France, looking to be a hero and join the Musketeers. His father was one, so he must be one too. After arriving to Paris and inadvertently impressing The Three Musketeers, he becomes embroiled in a plot to dethrone the young, naive and rather awkward King. For some strange reason, they drafted Orlando Bloom as the English accented vilian (whose acting was rather lame – not convincing at all, as the big baddie of the movie) who would wreck havoc along with Christoph Waltz’s Cardinal Richelieu and Milla Jovovich’s bungee jumping, scheming, De Winter. All that leaping and jumping and flying through the air was just a bit too much for me. I thought it looked out of place in the movie.
Funnily enough, the three rogue Musketeers were really rather good: props to Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson for carrying the storyline so well. Evans, Macfadyen and Stevenson definitely deserved more screen time as they were funny, entertaining and performed some great swordplay scenes. Instead, Anderson gives us the action horror flick chick, Milla Jovovich, who had a whole stupid bunch of scenes where she gets to look “cool” and attempts to “act”. D’Artagnan also annoyed us as he looked like a fresh faced teenager who had never held a sword, a day in his life. He’s best off milking the cows in the stable.
This show premiers in all GSC Cinemas starting on the 6th of October 2011.
