The Three Musketeers: Whats Hot at Redbox

Every 5 years or so a Three Musketeers movie pops out of the woodwork. The majority of them almost seem to be straight-to-dvd movies. This version of the Three Musketeers hardly made it past one month in the theaters and it’s not really a surprise. Even with the cast of Milla Jovovich, Orlando Bloom and that guy that looks like Orlando Bloom (Luke Evans) the movie falls flat despite its light tone.

The movie starts with an elaborate heist to steal Da Vinci’s blueprints for an airship. With the help of Milady (Jovovich), the three musketeers are able to collect all the necessary keys and avoid traps to get to Da Vinci’s vault.  Once they have collected their prize and are celebrating their success, they discover that Milady has sold them out to Buckingham (Bloom). The musketeers Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Evans) are disbanded by Cardinal Richeliu (Christopher Waltz) and left pretty much to rot on the streets of Paris. They each manage on their own. Porthos uses various women to pay for his goods, Aramis is more or less a meter maid and Athos, well, he’s a drunk. Enter D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) – a young, hot-blooded and reckless youth who has come to Paris to become a musketeer. Somehow  he manages to offend each of the previous musketeers and before their duel, they come together to fight off Richeliu’s guards for dueling illegally. Needless to say the four manage to defeat the other forty men, though they are still brought before the king for fighting. Fast forward a bit and the four men realize that Cardinal Richeliu is working with Milady to overthrow King Louis’ reign by setting up a scandal. So it’s up to these four men to uncover the plot and save France.

Like all musketeer movies, there’s a lot of fun swordplay and some rather solid choreography. The action sequences can be a tad repetitive and I’m pretty sure they use the same scene where Aramis is using the turret gun on the airship twice, but who’s paying attention. It’s definitely a movie that was made for 3D because there are just some very obvious 3D moments which, while there’s not really a lot going on, takes away from the action scenes. There’s also the played out trap setup where, without any previous knowledge, the person is able to easily get through the trap without getting the least bit hurt. The character development was practically non-existant. D’Artagnan starts off as a cocky and reckless kid and he stays that way, rather annoyingly, throughout the movie. You almost wish that he would get killed towards the end. All of the musketeers plays their specific role without any development: Porthos is the loud brute, Athos is the spurned lover of the femme fatale and can’t really get over her and Aramis is the cool guy. There’s also the fat page for the musketeers who is obviously the comic relief. Why he doesn’t just up and betray them is beyond me, they treat him horribly, making him sleep out on the balcony while the pigeons poop on him and verbally abusing him. It’s meant to be funny but it comes off just cruel. Waltz did a good job with Richeliu in showing his plotting yet cowardly actions. Bloom also did a nice job portraying the arrogant Buckingham. Still, while most of the actors probably did the movie because it was fun and a good payday, it didn’t really leave any kind of impression on me. It’s one of those movies you watch and enjoy for what it is, but forget about it the next day.