One of the fundamental rules of storytelling, especially in film, is to “show, don’t tell” the audience. Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers confuses the axiom for show-and-tell, elementary enough to crudely divide this swashbuckling tale into showy flourishes of action and scenes of talky exposition.
Throughout an all-CG opening, some portentous voiceover hastily establishes that, in this revisionist era, “Europe is a powder keg waiting to explode in a war that will engulf the entire continent…” of Europe. And, at the center of the turmoil, France is embroiled in a power struggle between the King (Louis XIII) and his advisor, Cardinal Richelieu (played by Inglourious Basterds baddie Christoph Waltz). Only a few men can save the continent, of Europe, from total destruction!
Then, “tada,” The Three Musketeers title as music blares and each character makes their sneaky entrance — more ninja than musketeer, really — accompanied by splashy freeze frames to spell out their names, one by one. Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), a moody fellow who is joined, then quickly betrayed, by Milady (de Winter), a duplicitous role that gives Milla Jovovich a reason to get dolled up, ooze sexuality, and… fight? Aramis (Luke Evans) is the trio’s pious, goateed gentleman. Finally, there is Porthos (Ray Stevenson), the brutish one.
Anderson’s Resident Evil series is born from a video game franchise and his AVP: Alien vs. Predator atrocity is a comic book concept, but Musketeers seems to hail from somewhere in between, despite being adapted from a classic Alexandre Dumas novel. The book’s status as part of public domain means Aramis now leaps into slow-motion swan dives from impossible heights and the swordplay take place in bullet time (a la best-selling game “Assassin’s Creed”), and the characters speak at one another in black-and-white blurbs.
Overdone set pieces are amped up by steampunk technology, like a booby-trapped hallway with motion sensors and a dues ex machina-nized airship, until the period flick starts to feel like Wild Wild West. In this case, the movie’s alternate 17th century basically becomes an anachronistic playground for Anderson’s elaborate make-believe, while the cast engages in equally extravagant dress up. 
Occasionally the two will combine, when Anderson and his wife play out voyeuristic choreography so full of frilly fetishism it evokes the sour taste of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
By the time Orlando Bloom enters as a slimy Duke of Buckingham with David Bowie’s style, you’ll have a pretty good idea what tone to expect. Just as the herky-jerky plot lurches into the tale of D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), a headstrong Musketeer fanboy who ventures forth to become “all for one, and one for all.” He eventually reinvigorates the dormant trio into clashing with Richelieu’s eye-patched number two, Captain Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen), and the pompous Duke, who actually exclaims, “the game is afoot!”
The thirteen-year-old me probably would have enjoyed Anderson’s campy, over-the-top version, but his special effects-heavy Three Musketeers is just too nonsensical for me now, when all I ask is that the swordplay have a point.
1.5 out of 5.
