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FILM REVIEW: THE THREE MUSKETEERS ***, Reviews

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 The first airship was invented in 1784 when Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a hand-powered propeller to a balloon, around 150 years too late for The Three Musketeers which is set – as an opening voice-over reminds us – at “the dawn of the 17th century”. That factoid has always been irrelevant, since The Three Musketeers doesn’t have any airships – but this insane new version does, not just floating airships over Versailles and Notre Dame but culminating in a battle between two airships, the smaller one crewed by D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, the larger one captained by the evil Comte de Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen). Nor is that the only insane innovation. Milady (Milla Jovovich) is now an action heroine, stripping to her scanties and abseiling down castle walls when she isn’t dodging swords with some Matrix-style ‘bullet time’. Aramis moonlights as a traffic cop, handing out 5-franc fines to horse-owners whose animals foul the thoroughfare. Athos emerges from a Venetian canal with a pair of crossbows strapped to his back, doing the patented videogame move where both hands simultaneously reach back, grab, fire and re-holster.

 The airships are the most significant change, clearly invoking Pirates of the Caribbean – and Three Musketeers is the best example I know of Europe trying to beat Hollywood at its own game by creating an action-comedy blockbuster (it’s produced by Constantin Film, a German studio led by the late Bernd Eichinger, to whom the film is dedicated). Like the similar attempts made by Luc Besson in France, its trump card lies in being slightly wilder than its Hollywood counterparts: its comedy is goofier, its action scenes more outrageous – and its fidelity to its so-called source so non-existent that you soon stop frowning at the liberties taken with Dumas, and revel in the freedom of knowing that anything can happen. 

 Here’s Porthos, singing a limerick about a girl who “had a nasty habit / involving a chicken, a dog and a rabbit” (alas, he’s interrupted before we find out more). Here’s Milady again, standing in a booby-trapped corridor where the slightest pressure on the floor causes the intruder to be cut down by hidden shotguns (her solution is to run really, really fast). The bare bones of the plot are still there, but rearranged in casual, arbitrary ways – so, for instance, in two out of three cases it’s newly-arrived D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) who challenges the Musketeers to a duel, instead of vice versa. The most significant change is perhaps that King Louis (a manchild and fashion victim) becomes good buddies with D’Artagnan, even asking for romantic advice – because that’s the film’s sensibility, gleefully oblivious to class distinctions, codes of honour and all that old stuff. Would a king really bond with a Gascon peasant in the 17th century? Yeah, whatever.

 “Choose love,” says Athos to his young friend; France can take care of itself. Personal contentment over duty is the film’s philosophy, insofar as it has a philosophy, which of course is exactly why it pays no more than lip-service to the classic novel. This is usually a bad thing, but Three Musketeers is done with gusto. Richelieu (always-great Christoph Waltz) plays chess with the King, who takes issue with the whole game – surely the King should be the most powerful piece? – and knocks over the board like a petulant child when he loses (“Your Majesty,” smiles sly Richelieu, “is a force of Nature”). D’Artagnan flirts with Constance, the lady-in-waiting who despairs of this cocky-but-crude Gascon youth (“In the battle of wits,” she sighs, “you are unarmed”). And always director Paul W.S. Anderson is showing the videogame-inflected visual invention that made Resident Evil and its sequels so bearable, swooping down on a map decked out with CGI soldiers or staging the final (exciting) duel on a narrow ledge atop Notre Dame.

 Even the clichés seem to work here: Richelieu’s “Rochefort … (pause) Do not fail me again!”, or the other Musketeers saying “I know Athos may seem cold and unfriendly but don’t be fooled, he really is cold and unfriendly!”. The film is reprehensible – yet it’s also airy, knowing and light-hearted without rubbing our noses in it. Near the end, the Musketeers formulate a plan, and we hear them talk about it and watch it being put into action – but then suddenly it turns out that’s not the plan, and the real plan involves commandeering an airship and smashing it into the castle. You can’t treat an audience that way – yet the sudden shift from logic to mindless spectacle has its own insane momentum, and you get a cool shot of D’Artagnan leaping through the air from turret to airship. Alexandre Dumas wouldn’t approve, but I like to think he’d secretly chuckle. 

DIRECTED BY Paul W.S. Anderson

STARRING Logan Lerman, Milla Jovovich, Christoph Waltz

Germany 2011                             110 mins.