The Musketeer
Avoid at All Costs
While it may seem petty, in light of this week's events, to decry this movie as an abomination, well, that is what it felt like sitting in the theatre. The Musketeer starts out in an average enough fashion, with slightly wooden dialogue, Tim Roth over acting, super tight shots of abrupt movements. Then, an appalling 1970's student film takes over for the opening credits. Apparently paying Xin Xin Xiong (the fight choreographer, whose name was the only one billed in the previews) left no cash for the titles. My companions giggled uncomfortably during the weird and horrible early 80's TV movie titles. Still, chin up, we will survive this - and besides, the teaser portion of the movie looked just fine. Key word: Looked. Please note the past tense.
Then the movie reverted back to normal. The sucking began slowly, gradually, imperceptibly. An out of focus shot here, an overly dark action sequence there, inexplicable behavior and silly dialogue scattered like breadcrumbs in the dark woods. It was still the first real scene in the film, it could just have been a ham-handed bid at mystery.
The first fight scene is elaborate, almost cartoonish in its fifty-moves-where-one-will-do, with fingerhold balance absurdity. Impressive hiding of the wires, however - it was so dark in this scene they could have been suspended from nautical ropes. Was it dark? You bet - almost totally Asian stunt team (according to the credits) probably did not resemble their white French Gallic patrician characters very much, so the director opts for a muddy too-close soup of stupidity.
The director, Peter Hyams, is also the cinematographer (in a low attempt to be Robert Rodriguez, I suppose) and his name set off clanging Notre Dame-size bells in my head - but from what? End of Days, that wasn't so bad (but now that I think about it, it was dark), Timecop - and The Relic. Long the butt of my movie crowd's derision, The Relic was only used as an object of positive comparison after Phantoms came out. Similarly, The Musketeer is only watchable when compared to the truly unwatchable, like Battlefield Earth. We did have a lot of laughs watching this film, and it is extremely MST3K-friendly, but man is it rank.
Enter the dame, modern American Virgin/Beauty/Pie's Mena Suvari, whose period acting is comparable to Winona Ryder's. "Sexual tension" is played as flat wit after being translated into various languages. Then it gets worse. Continuity is non-existent - bad guys disappear when they are dispatched like a Playstation game, and turn up with the same logic-free silliness. By the end we were holding our pounding heads in agony (like Relic companion SJ's forehead bruise after pounding his fist there repeatedly during that film), rolling our eyes, gasping in horror, and inserting our own superior dialogue. Instead of calling in, say, William Goldman or Carrie Fisher, apparently all the script rewrites were done by Koko (the gorilla) - didn't Cardinal Richlieu at one point say "drink drink apple me kill D'Artagnan?" Bad dialogue, dark dark scenes, Stephen Rea & Tim Roth yawning through their scenes, Catherine Deneuve looking like she shot up heroin just to tolerate the job, and D'Artagnan (The Wedding Planner's Justin Chambers) almost irritatingly serious throughout.
Good points: production design, art department, locations, makeup, wardrobe, all fantastic. The ladder scene (even if it is ridiculous, it's still extremely cool.) Bad points: Everything else. The entire movie is a flimsy and needlessly complex construct to justify the admittedly cool ladder scene. FYI: The Ladder Scene is one hour, 45 minutes into the film. Do yourself a favor: buy a ticket to Rat Race, watch these 5 minutes of the Musketeer, and then go see Rat Race.
Hong Kong actioners generally don't need such dense and elaborate plots to show off cool fight choreography. The Must-Not-Hear is low on fights, big on badly explained 17th century French politics, and long on suck. The HTML code on the home page for The Musketeer would be a better screenplay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2001 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. cinerina@flash.net Check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/ - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource http://www.mediamotions.com http://www.capitol-city.com
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