THE MUSKETEER []
Shoddy remake with obviously fake violence. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated PG-13 (mild sexual humor). At the 42nd Street E Walk, the Kips Bay, the Loews 84th Street, others.
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TERRIBLE in almost every way, even by the lamentable standards of recent action movies – let alone Richard Lester’s superb 1973 “The Three Musketeers” – “The Musketeer” is an example of lazy, dumb and couldn’t-care-less hack movie making.
Everything about “The Musketeer” feels perfunctory. And even if you could look past the crude but confused plotting, nonexistent characterization and lousy acting, you simply cannot forgive the boring badness of the action sequences.
There’s a lot of wire-assisted jumping around (much of it obviously performed by stunt doubles), but the fights are so fake, so completely without either grace or a sense of danger, that you miss even the relative realism of old Errol Flynn movies.
(Memo to all studio heads: Simply having some guy swinging around on wires under the direction of a Chinese choreographer doesn’t add up to the exhilaration of a “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”)
The fights even sound fake: When a sword blade hits home, it echoes like a blow from a club; musket shots sound like popgun caps.
The basic plot is, of course, from Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” of which this is the umpteenth but possibly worst movie version.
You could argue that it’s rightly called “The Musketeer,” because even though the hero, D’Artagnan, hasn’t yet joined the brotherhood, the actual three musketeers have drastically shrunken roles. Of the trio, only Aramis (Nick Moran from “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”) is allowed to have any personality at all.
The movie starts with the murder of young D’Artagnan’s parents by the black-leather-wearing bad guy, Febre (Tim Roth – proving again that he’s the best movie villain of our time). Then, after the credits, you meet D’Artagnan (former model Justin Chambers) all grown up and ready to go to Paris to become a musketeer like his father.
Not only is he a superhuman rider and swordsman, in this version, D’Artagnan has nothing to learn from the musketeers he meets in Paris. Nevertheless, he teams up with these losers to frustrate a plot by Cardinal Richelieu (Stephen Rea, doing an English accent) and to protect Francesca (Mena Suvari), a hotel chambermaid who has the ear of the Queen (Catherine Deneuve, slumming with dignity).
In a criminal waste of talent, Roth is simply superb as the evil Febre, upstaging the bland, pretty-boy hero even more effectively than Alan Rickman did Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.”
Director Peter Hyams (“End of Days,” “TimeCop”), working from a script by Gene Quintano, gives you no sense of period formality, or of the grandeur of the French court.
Because everything is shot close and narrow, as if for TV, it looks like 16th-century France had a population of about 30 people.
There is one good deliberately anachronistic joke about the Paris sewers, but a host of other anachronisms serves only to illustrate the low regard these filmmakers have for their work, the source material and the audience.
These include an absurd charge at a castle wall by mounted musketeers.
Somehow, the fact that “The Musketeer” was shot in some beautiful French landscapes and around some spectacular castles only makes the production feel more wasteful and contemptuous.