WORLD TOUR Day 42 - Paris, France
BEFORE: Well, I said a lot of these films would come in pairs - I don't have a copy of the 2011 film "The Three Musketeers", but I do have the 2001 version, for comparative purposes. Linking from last night's film, Rebecca De Mornay was also in "American Reunion" with Mena Suvari (last seen in "Kiss the Girls").
THE PLOT: D'Artagnan attempts to join the king's elite guards, the Royal Musketeers, and find the man who killed his parents.
AFTER: Well, this is a version of the story that makes last night's Disney-fied version look pretty good, or at least more faithful to the original novel. This one throws out nearly all of Dumas' plot points, except for the fact that D'Artagnan wants to join the Musketeers. Gone are the duels that introduce him to Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and instead we get riots among the poor, a bunch of sexual innuendo, and conversations about legends of crocodiles in the Paris sewers (why mention them - TWICE - if they don't appear in the story?)
The plot between the queen and Buckingham is intact (last night's film dispensed with this), but is it good or bad? Here the queen is not only not evil, she's almost an action hero herself. At least the king and queen aren't teenagers this time.
You can see the influences of more modern, more successful films, such as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (fight sequences), "Batman" (the death of D'Artagnan's parents), and the Indiana Jones series (the carriage chase was a combination of the truck chase from "Raiders" and the tank battle from "Last Crusade").
Though there were some actual French people in this one, it bothered me that the main character couldn't seem to pronounce his own name - he says "DAR-tin-yun" instead of "dar-TAN-yan". Which wouldn't be a problem, except that the more experienced actors know the correct way to pronounce it, so it stands out.
Most of the plot details are non-existent, so the motivations of the different factions were quite confusing, and the final battle was just a mess, and the final duel was physically impossible.
NITPICK POINT: Who has a room with 50 ladders in it? How many do you need to reach something? Just one, right? Were they in a ladder warehouse?
Also starring Justin Chambers, Catherine Deneuve, Tim Roth (last seen in "Rob Roy"), Stephen Rea (last seen in "The End of the Affair").
RATING: 3 out of 10 kegs of gunpowder
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