"The Three Musketeers" Review (in very basic English, my brain melts these days)
Okay. Deep breath. Where to start.
Really, I need to focus because everything I want to do right now is to scream, stomp my feet and watch my face doing this funny thing between laughing and crying. Oh and I would like to burn the rest of Dumas' corpse so he won't be able to rise on Judgment Day and will be spared this... thing.
The movie "The Three Musketeers" was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson who also brought us such mindravelling masterpieces as "Death Race" and "Resident Evil" (the latter may be responsible for Milla Jovovich's appearance in "T3M" as Anderson might have a huge crush on her but, really who could blame him).
Anyways, the fact that an action/horror flick guy takes on Alexandre Dumas's novel should not automatically mean that the movie will be a brainless, supposed-to-be-funny mash up of every cliché ever fantasized, right.
Wrong.
The movie is a brainless, clichéd mess full of jokes that rarely work and the worst part is: it's boring!
One could ask: How? How can this possibly be boring with Christoph Waltz, Milla, Mads Mikkelsen (whom I managed to mistake for August Diehl but really that eye patch was distracting! XD) aaand Orlando Bloom?
I'd like to give you an answer but I'm really not sure I can point out everything that is wrong with this movie, so here have my top three most annoying things in "The Three Musketeers"
1) The shameless stealing (and the lazy ass clichés):
So you have a great cast, you have a really big fat budget and your only goal is to do an amusing summer flick that appeals to men, women and families.
You could either spend this money on a decent story writer who could dive into the material and bring you an amusing script full of winks and hints that convey the following message: "Yes, we know, we are dealing with old stuff here but hey, it's still fun because we have super awesome character interacting and some really great jokes".
Or you spend all that money on cheap (REALLY REALLY CHEAP, see point number two) CGI effects and costume porn and hope to sedate your audience till the point where they won't see the major plotholes or the halfassed writing.
I admit, I'm an action flick chick, I love stuff like "Die Hard" but believe me when I say: the writing here is bad. Like really really bad.
The clichés are so overwhelming and played so downright serious that the audience sits there like: "WTF. Are you really making me eat up the Matrix-esque slow motion like I've seen it a hundred million times before?"
And yes, they do make you eat it up and you don't enjoy it. At all.
This movie badly ripped off everything: the new Sherlock Holmes movie (the slow mo, the character introduction, and it really doesn’t help that Matthew MacFayden (Athos) resembles Robert Downey Jr (and Jan Josef Liefers xD) a lot!), the "Da Vinci Code" (yeah Hollywood we like gimmicks, we really do, but FFFFUUU), Indiana Jones, James Bond, Entrapment (in a really bad way), the bad romantic stuff bound to happen in every action movie, the overly long scenes with the superhot chick that does cool assassin-stuff; hell, pinku and I were really busy pointing everything out we know from Assassin's Creed(!!!) and other "fantasy" or "adventure" games and everything was just... you have seen it all before and because of how downright serious everyone takes everything it’s just not enjoyable to watch.
A cliché I especially hate also did a cameo: the Musketeers have their sidekick, Porthos's servant Planchet (I must admit I've never seen him in such a big role in any other movie, so here, movie, take your cookie) - and everyone is constantly making fun of him because... yeah exactly because for no reason what so ever. He seems like a really nice, gay or at least bisexual, overweight guy who talks a lot so why would anyone make fun of him. Really. I cannot see one single reason for Hollywood to do that... /shoots herself in the knee because that's really less painful. He isn’t even stupid or cowardly and still everyone looks down upon him! /rage
I could go on forever and ever with this but every stupid cliché you can possibly think of is in this movie and everything is taken serious so eat your heart out on stupid, non-funny one liners, disrespectful treatment of the sidekick, the moral of the story being delivered with the subtlety of a hammer, action scenes that don't quite cut it and stupid, stupid really stuuuuuupid romance scenes. (“Fräulein Ach-so-Herrlich-Wunderbar” was a good joke though. Summing up all the vomit-inducing scenes before). Conclusion: BORING!
(Damn, I am mistreating my keyboard, I have to calm down, on to number two).
2) The Special Cheap Effets and Setting awkwardness
This one is especially off putting. Since no money whatsoever went into the script department at least the movie should be pretty to look at and concerning the costumes and solid settings that's true: Bamberg's charms and magic really are portrayed and the fancy costumes deliver pure eye candy (the amount of time spent on talking about them makes it difficult to ignore them, really).
But beware of cheap background optics or the enormous “BLING BLING” of jewels (seriously WTF), they are going to burn your eyes for eternity. Such… lazy and half assed and uninspired work is downright awful when you see the great costumes (and the even greater actors) forced to act in a barely coated blue screen wall. Everything that is happening indoors is awesome to look at, you get your cheesy history-movie feeling and everything is sparkle and rainbows.
Then you follow the characters into the actual cities and it still looks pretty decent, blue screen here and there detected but mostly well done.
Then you get the fight scenes and to make them epic you of course have to overlook the cities and backgrounds and that’s where they really start to suck. Badly. Nothing fits together and because we have already seen so many incarnations of Louis-treize-Paris, this shit can’t hold up.
(Ohh and don’t get me started on fakey -looking-Notre Dame. Is there any church in Europe that has been more tortured over the years? Burned in “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, smashed in “Van Helsing” and now raped by two… ah no, the spoilers. But believe me, the old lady got raped).
I really wouldn’t mind this so much if there had been anything amiable about the gimmicks and airships they introduced, but there was nothing. (I mean, come on! Airships! Steampunk galore! After seeing the trailer I was almost throwing a party in my pants because adventure story plus steampunky elements in siècle-de-Costume Porn? AWESOME!)
Nothing in the story justified those airships being there, Buckingham would have been as glamorous (and faaaaabulous xD) and dangerous without them or if he just had normal ships (of which he had plenty). And the oh so important role this one ship played when he visited France for the first time only conveyed following message: “WE HAD SO MUCH FUN IN THE CGI DEPARTMENT BECAUSE OF ALL THE WEED!”
Yeah and that’s pretty much it about the airships and the general craptastic settings. Fucking disappointing. -..-
3) Fuck you Hollywood and be just a bit more courageous! JUST A BIT!
The funny thing about this point is that I discussed it with ”failte_aoife” failte_aoife before I actually saw the movie. She said that she thought it blatantly boring that Hollywood shies away from doing anything original, so every movie needs to have a “big” name in the title (the Sherlock Holmes remake e.g. could have been just another buddy-movie without the whole Sherlock/Watson setting and maybe it would have worked).
I argued that a remake always gives the opportunity to take a new interesting look at the characters, the setting, the decisions they make (as for Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes”: it’s cool how he is a social outcast and how the dislike Sherlock might have received from the police and other people is played out here!) and combining that with motifs everyone already knows could be great.
Or not.
In “The Three Musketeers” the main problem is that you already know the characters and you already know the plot. So, movie, what new and exciting ideas and motifs you offer me in order to spend money on you? Not airships, we already established that, thank you. Orlando Bloom in faaabulous clothing? Is that everything, really? Oh and Aramis with his glasses, ohhh yes, movie, give it to me!
Oh dear if that’s everything than of course nothing good can come out of this.
So here is the point where I swallow my own words and go with failte_aoife ”failte_aoife”: this movie would have been much cooler if they had just introduced new characters because then the rest wouldn’t have been soooo important because you were forced to get to know the new guys on the block. But when hearing “Athos, Porthos and Aramis” I have some sort of expectation of how the guys have to behave (there was ONE! JUST ONE single mention of Aramis being a womanizer. ONE, MIND YOU! And he was degraded to work as “meter maid” (“Politesse”, keine Ahnung, wie man das gut übersetzt xD) instead of dealing with his affairs when meeting d’Artagnan. Damn you, movie, damn you! Although he has the most spectacular pair of glasses EVER to be shown on a movie screen).
If those expectations get screwed with due to lazy ass writing and nothing new is to be seen ANYWHERE, a movie really has a hard time getting on my good side. This one failed. Badly. And I’m actually quite disappointed.
To sum it all up, the movie sucks and would have been better if the characters had more time to interact with each other, because really, the actors are great and have loooots of fun and Orlando Bloom as Count Fabulous is worth a look.
I don’t want to keep anyone of you from running into the cinema and watch it yourself and maybe scold me for what I wrote here but in the future, I certainly will be careful as to what movies and show to get my hopes up for.
With this in mind: All for one and one for… oh fuck it, this movie doesn’t even deserve that. -..-
Really, I need to focus because everything I want to do right now is to scream, stomp my feet and watch my face doing this funny thing between laughing and crying. Oh and I would like to burn the rest of Dumas' corpse so he won't be able to rise on Judgment Day and will be spared this... thing.
The movie "The Three Musketeers" was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson who also brought us such mindravelling masterpieces as "Death Race" and "Resident Evil" (the latter may be responsible for Milla Jovovich's appearance in "T3M" as Anderson might have a huge crush on her but, really who could blame him).
Anyways, the fact that an action/horror flick guy takes on Alexandre Dumas's novel should not automatically mean that the movie will be a brainless, supposed-to-be-funny mash up of every cliché ever fantasized, right.
Wrong.
The movie is a brainless, clichéd mess full of jokes that rarely work and the worst part is: it's boring!
One could ask: How? How can this possibly be boring with Christoph Waltz, Milla, Mads Mikkelsen (whom I managed to mistake for August Diehl but really that eye patch was distracting! XD) aaand Orlando Bloom?
I'd like to give you an answer but I'm really not sure I can point out everything that is wrong with this movie, so here have my top three most annoying things in "The Three Musketeers"
1) The shameless stealing (and the lazy ass clichés):
So you have a great cast, you have a really big fat budget and your only goal is to do an amusing summer flick that appeals to men, women and families.
You could either spend this money on a decent story writer who could dive into the material and bring you an amusing script full of winks and hints that convey the following message: "Yes, we know, we are dealing with old stuff here but hey, it's still fun because we have super awesome character interacting and some really great jokes".
Or you spend all that money on cheap (REALLY REALLY CHEAP, see point number two) CGI effects and costume porn and hope to sedate your audience till the point where they won't see the major plotholes or the halfassed writing.
I admit, I'm an action flick chick, I love stuff like "Die Hard" but believe me when I say: the writing here is bad. Like really really bad.
The clichés are so overwhelming and played so downright serious that the audience sits there like: "WTF. Are you really making me eat up the Matrix-esque slow motion like I've seen it a hundred million times before?"
And yes, they do make you eat it up and you don't enjoy it. At all.
This movie badly ripped off everything: the new Sherlock Holmes movie (the slow mo, the character introduction, and it really doesn’t help that Matthew MacFayden (Athos) resembles Robert Downey Jr (and Jan Josef Liefers xD) a lot!), the "Da Vinci Code" (yeah Hollywood we like gimmicks, we really do, but FFFFUUU), Indiana Jones, James Bond, Entrapment (in a really bad way), the bad romantic stuff bound to happen in every action movie, the overly long scenes with the superhot chick that does cool assassin-stuff; hell, pinku and I were really busy pointing everything out we know from Assassin's Creed(!!!) and other "fantasy" or "adventure" games and everything was just... you have seen it all before and because of how downright serious everyone takes everything it’s just not enjoyable to watch.
A cliché I especially hate also did a cameo: the Musketeers have their sidekick, Porthos's servant Planchet (I must admit I've never seen him in such a big role in any other movie, so here, movie, take your cookie) - and everyone is constantly making fun of him because... yeah exactly because for no reason what so ever. He seems like a really nice, gay or at least bisexual, overweight guy who talks a lot so why would anyone make fun of him. Really. I cannot see one single reason for Hollywood to do that... /shoots herself in the knee because that's really less painful. He isn’t even stupid or cowardly and still everyone looks down upon him! /rage
I could go on forever and ever with this but every stupid cliché you can possibly think of is in this movie and everything is taken serious so eat your heart out on stupid, non-funny one liners, disrespectful treatment of the sidekick, the moral of the story being delivered with the subtlety of a hammer, action scenes that don't quite cut it and stupid, stupid really stuuuuuupid romance scenes. (“Fräulein Ach-so-Herrlich-Wunderbar” was a good joke though. Summing up all the vomit-inducing scenes before). Conclusion: BORING!
(Damn, I am mistreating my keyboard, I have to calm down, on to number two).
2) The Special Cheap Effets and Setting awkwardness
This one is especially off putting. Since no money whatsoever went into the script department at least the movie should be pretty to look at and concerning the costumes and solid settings that's true: Bamberg's charms and magic really are portrayed and the fancy costumes deliver pure eye candy (the amount of time spent on talking about them makes it difficult to ignore them, really).
But beware of cheap background optics or the enormous “BLING BLING” of jewels (seriously WTF), they are going to burn your eyes for eternity. Such… lazy and half assed and uninspired work is downright awful when you see the great costumes (and the even greater actors) forced to act in a barely coated blue screen wall. Everything that is happening indoors is awesome to look at, you get your cheesy history-movie feeling and everything is sparkle and rainbows.
Then you follow the characters into the actual cities and it still looks pretty decent, blue screen here and there detected but mostly well done.
Then you get the fight scenes and to make them epic you of course have to overlook the cities and backgrounds and that’s where they really start to suck. Badly. Nothing fits together and because we have already seen so many incarnations of Louis-treize-Paris, this shit can’t hold up.
(Ohh and don’t get me started on fakey -looking-Notre Dame. Is there any church in Europe that has been more tortured over the years? Burned in “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, smashed in “Van Helsing” and now raped by two… ah no, the spoilers. But believe me, the old lady got raped).
I really wouldn’t mind this so much if there had been anything amiable about the gimmicks and airships they introduced, but there was nothing. (I mean, come on! Airships! Steampunk galore! After seeing the trailer I was almost throwing a party in my pants because adventure story plus steampunky elements in siècle-de-Costume Porn? AWESOME!)
Nothing in the story justified those airships being there, Buckingham would have been as glamorous (and faaaaabulous xD) and dangerous without them or if he just had normal ships (of which he had plenty). And the oh so important role this one ship played when he visited France for the first time only conveyed following message: “WE HAD SO MUCH FUN IN THE CGI DEPARTMENT BECAUSE OF ALL THE WEED!”
Yeah and that’s pretty much it about the airships and the general craptastic settings. Fucking disappointing. -..-
3) Fuck you Hollywood and be just a bit more courageous! JUST A BIT!
The funny thing about this point is that I discussed it with ”failte_aoife” failte_aoife before I actually saw the movie. She said that she thought it blatantly boring that Hollywood shies away from doing anything original, so every movie needs to have a “big” name in the title (the Sherlock Holmes remake e.g. could have been just another buddy-movie without the whole Sherlock/Watson setting and maybe it would have worked).
I argued that a remake always gives the opportunity to take a new interesting look at the characters, the setting, the decisions they make (as for Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes”: it’s cool how he is a social outcast and how the dislike Sherlock might have received from the police and other people is played out here!) and combining that with motifs everyone already knows could be great.
Or not.
In “The Three Musketeers” the main problem is that you already know the characters and you already know the plot. So, movie, what new and exciting ideas and motifs you offer me in order to spend money on you? Not airships, we already established that, thank you. Orlando Bloom in faaabulous clothing? Is that everything, really? Oh and Aramis with his glasses, ohhh yes, movie, give it to me!
Oh dear if that’s everything than of course nothing good can come out of this.
So here is the point where I swallow my own words and go with failte_aoife ”failte_aoife”: this movie would have been much cooler if they had just introduced new characters because then the rest wouldn’t have been soooo important because you were forced to get to know the new guys on the block. But when hearing “Athos, Porthos and Aramis” I have some sort of expectation of how the guys have to behave (there was ONE! JUST ONE single mention of Aramis being a womanizer. ONE, MIND YOU! And he was degraded to work as “meter maid” (“Politesse”, keine Ahnung, wie man das gut übersetzt xD) instead of dealing with his affairs when meeting d’Artagnan. Damn you, movie, damn you! Although he has the most spectacular pair of glasses EVER to be shown on a movie screen).
If those expectations get screwed with due to lazy ass writing and nothing new is to be seen ANYWHERE, a movie really has a hard time getting on my good side. This one failed. Badly. And I’m actually quite disappointed.
To sum it all up, the movie sucks and would have been better if the characters had more time to interact with each other, because really, the actors are great and have loooots of fun and Orlando Bloom as Count Fabulous is worth a look.
I don’t want to keep anyone of you from running into the cinema and watch it yourself and maybe scold me for what I wrote here but in the future, I certainly will be careful as to what movies and show to get my hopes up for.
With this in mind: All for one and one for… oh fuck it, this movie doesn’t even deserve that. -..-