Starring Logan Lerman, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Milla Jovovich, Christoph Waltz, Mads Mikkelsen, Orlando Bloom, Gabriella Wilde, James Corden, Freddie Fox, Juno Temple
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Expectations: Low, but I’m fairly excited.
On the general scale:
On the B-movie scale:
I won’t even try to pretend that I knew what was going on throughout most of The Three Musketeers, but I never really cared. The movie is chock full — and I mean CHOCK FULL — of imaginative, wild shit, so something as mundane and boring as an understandable plot just simply had to fall by the wayside. Sure, this is sure to add fuel to the detractors’ fire, but those who accept what the film is trying to do will enjoy it rather well. And those who stumble in looking for a traditional re-telling of the classic story will be absolutely crushed.
But I’m honestly not deeply familiar with the original tale, so really I don’t know how good of an adaptation this is. I’m pretty sure there weren’t any airships in the Dumas original, though. 🙂 What I can comment on was how much this particular adaptation reminded me of a Shaw Brothers wuxia film. I don’t know if it was the swords, or maybe the over-the-top fantasy of the character’s actions in the action sequences, or the complicated plot involving various factions all jockeying for supremacy, or the exaggerated villains typified by broad strokes of melodrama, but all throughout the film I kept coming back to how much it felt like a Western version of an old-school wuxia film. It’s not nearly as entertaining as one of those, but seeing as there aren’t a lot of Western-made wuxia films, I have to give this one some slack, just like I did the same for some of the really early Shaw films.