The Musketeer (2001)

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The Musketeer (2001)

East-Fighting Style meets Near-West Wigs and Fencing Swords--You've got to be kidding

One of the big tipoffs as to how bad this movie really was was contained in the theatrical trailers, where the announcer bragged about "martial arts choreographer Xin Xin Xiong," famed for his work in Once Upon a Time in China and other such movies, being involved in this one. Whenever you find a Musketeers movie of any caliber being touted for its martial arts-style fighting rather than the works of Sir Alexander Dumas himself, you know you've got a problem.

I suppose under the right circumstances I could have lived with the showy fighting, even though there were only three or four good fight scenes and one of them was too confusing to follow--everywhere I looked I saw longhaired white guys with swords. Who were the good guys? Who were the bad guys? Who cares? But the story and pacing behind The Musketeer wavered between confusing and pointless.

Young D'Artagnan witness the death of his father at the hands of the evil Febre (Tim Roth) and somehow manages to scratch Febre's cheek and therefore blind him. Whatever. Flash forward to an older D'Artagnan (Justin Chambers), who has been trained by his geezer friend Planchett (Jean-Pierre Castaldi) to be a Musketeer, complete with curly long hair, cumbersome cloak and wide-brimmed hat, and toothpick sword. Smokin'. D'Artagnan thrusts himself into a pointless barroom brawl (cool Fight Scene #1) on his way to Paris, where he manages to balance on barrels, roll between ceiling rafters and step over tables while fighting three other guys and eating his breakfast. What is this, seventeenth-century France or last week's Lumberjack Contest on TNT?

In Paris, our prepubescent hero immediately becomes embroiled in the Machievellian schemings of Cardinal Richelieu (Stephen Rea) and interested in the lovely young not-a-virgin-for-long Francesca (Mena Suvari). He also tries to hook up with the other Musketeers (fat, slovenly and slow, all of them) and earn their respect so they can go free some other geezer from prison and revolt against the Cardinal. They stage manage some kind of prison release (cool Fight Scene #2), but Febre is hot on his trail, leading up to a kidnapping, political conspiracies and finally a thirty-Musketeer charge upon the castle, where D'Artagnan and Febre face off mano y mano (Cool Fight Scene #4--I forget what #3 was).

One accurate summation of the movie would be not enough cool fight scenes and too much cumbersome dialogue and story. It's entertaining to watch a bunch of guys swordfight each other while hanging on ropes off a castle wall (I have a hunch the special effects team did better work than they'll ever be given credit for), but when you don't really give a crap whether the good guy plummets to his death or not, the effects are somewhat wasted. Sooner or later people will stop trying to insert The Matrix or Jet Li into any damn movie that even remotely qualifies as an action film, at which point the screenwriters will start actually reading the original novel(s) and come up with something halfway decent.

-Long