The Three Musketeers (15.)
Directed by Paul WS Anderson.
Starring Logan Lerman, Milla Jovovich, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom and Christophe Waltz. 110 mins
This is the Euro zone crisis made celluloid. Haphazard, without vision, misguided, compromised and muddling through, this production of a French classic with a mostly British cast (except for an American D’Artagnan and some European baddies) and funded predominantly by German money has all the attributes of the classic europudding co-production. The more it tries to exude a brash, larky, tongue-in-cheek exuberance the more it resembles an overblown version of a play what Ernie Wise wrote; the more it tries to be like a Hollywood film the more it seems like the deluded posturing of a spent continent.
As is the way in the EU, the man at the top is a box ticking mediocrity, in this case director Paul W. S. Anderson. Anderson may not be the world’s worst director (although the case could be made) but his films are always something much less than they should be, a hacked together patchwork of ideas nicked from other films. He is a Les Dennis director, delivering flat impersonations of genuine artists.
And he’s terrible with actors. Orlando Blooming Useless gets a lot of (often unfair) stick but Anderson takes him lower here. He is surpassed though by Macfadyen’s Athos. Granted, he is supposed to be playing a character who is a jaded drunkard but he’s been made up to look so pale that the whole film seems to be one long morning-after-the-night-before as he desperately tries get his lines out while keeping the contents of his stomach down.
Everything in it is second rate but at least it is extravagantly second rate, you get a lot of it. The production doesn’t skimp on Versailles opulence. The film is fast and loud and busy and possibly enjoyably if you are in the market for the most expensive Adam and the Ants video ever made.
But the worst thing about it though is imagining what American audiences will make of it. It may be a European production but most of the faces are English, and the shame will be ours. There’s Juno Temple done up like Bonnie Langford as Queen Anne; Jovovich as Milady looking like an Amazon Kylie Minogue and James Corden as the comic relief - it’s like a compendium of English naffness, a concerted effort to put our worst foot forward. Back in the early nineties Beavis or Butthead once proclaimed, “England, that’s that place where everything sucks” and I imagine their modern counterparts having a similar reaction.
Directed by Paul WS Anderson.
Starring Logan Lerman, Milla Jovovich, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom and Christophe Waltz. 110 mins
This is the Euro zone crisis made celluloid. Haphazard, without vision, misguided, compromised and muddling through, this production of a French classic with a mostly British cast (except for an American D’Artagnan and some European baddies) and funded predominantly by German money has all the attributes of the classic europudding co-production. The more it tries to exude a brash, larky, tongue-in-cheek exuberance the more it resembles an overblown version of a play what Ernie Wise wrote; the more it tries to be like a Hollywood film the more it seems like the deluded posturing of a spent continent.
As is the way in the EU, the man at the top is a box ticking mediocrity, in this case director Paul W. S. Anderson. Anderson may not be the world’s worst director (although the case could be made) but his films are always something much less than they should be, a hacked together patchwork of ideas nicked from other films. He is a Les Dennis director, delivering flat impersonations of genuine artists.
And he’s terrible with actors. Orlando Blooming Useless gets a lot of (often unfair) stick but Anderson takes him lower here. He is surpassed though by Macfadyen’s Athos. Granted, he is supposed to be playing a character who is a jaded drunkard but he’s been made up to look so pale that the whole film seems to be one long morning-after-the-night-before as he desperately tries get his lines out while keeping the contents of his stomach down.
Everything in it is second rate but at least it is extravagantly second rate, you get a lot of it. The production doesn’t skimp on Versailles opulence. The film is fast and loud and busy and possibly enjoyably if you are in the market for the most expensive Adam and the Ants video ever made.
But the worst thing about it though is imagining what American audiences will make of it. It may be a European production but most of the faces are English, and the shame will be ours. There’s Juno Temple done up like Bonnie Langford as Queen Anne; Jovovich as Milady looking like an Amazon Kylie Minogue and James Corden as the comic relief - it’s like a compendium of English naffness, a concerted effort to put our worst foot forward. Back in the early nineties Beavis or Butthead once proclaimed, “England, that’s that place where everything sucks” and I imagine their modern counterparts having a similar reaction.
