THE MUSKETEER review

I mentioned traveling 11,000 miles to check a film out this past weekend, and this is that film… THE MUSKETEER, formerly known as D’ARTAGNAN.

About a week ago I was contacted by Peter Hyams, who wanted to show me THE MUSKETEER, he had just assembled the print and was screening it for a small gathering of people in London. My instant reaction was to ask him to screen it in Austin, as it does sound silly to travel halfway around the world to just see a movie. But alas, he was only screening it there, so either I accept a trip to London, which consisted of about 27 hours of airplanes and car travel, to spend 7 waking hours in London, and an hour and forty-two minutes of those watching a movie.

I can’t believe some people find this type of life glamorous… the fact of the matter is I’m exhausted from this travel, and I did this to see yet another interpretation of Alexandre Dumas’ THE THREE MUSKETEERS?

Well… exactly.

I love Dumas’ THREE MUSKETEERS, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. Of the 3, the musketeer story has been most entrancing in cinema history.

The first film I operated a VCR to record was Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS (either that or JEREMIAH JOHNSON, I never can remember that fact straight). As a child of the seventies, the Richard Lester version was supreme… until I saw the Gene Kelly, Van Heflin version… and then I saw Douglas Fairbanks’ version… and then the Ritz Brothers’ version, which never was in danger of winning the contest of adaptations.

Peter Hyams’ screen adaptation of the THREE MUSKETEERS story line is as different on screen as Lester’s was from the Kelly version as that was from the Fairbanks.

You see, the Fairbanks THREE MUSKETEERS was pure rollicking adventurous fun… Daring stunts and leaps and flourishes of steel, all done with a smile. It’s a Prozac film.

The Gene Kelly version is Manic Depressive… The film begins light and joyful, but turns dark dark dark…

The Richard Lester version has a grime to its soul… The deep dark found in the soul of its Athos by Oliver Reed… The movie is filled with joyous celebration of the brotherhood of the Musketeers, but really there is a sadness that hangs over the entirety of the two films…

However… in all three films there were rules that remained unbroken. D’artagnan is a young brash, inexperienced talented braggart. Planchet is his fool of a man-servant. The films all played with camp quite a bit. Richelieu is a conniving evil force. Febre is a secondary villain and the King of France is a puppet. Oh, and it is great to be a musketeer, but the films never really illustrate what the meaning of being a musketeer really means to a musketeer. There will be drinking, women and fighting.

Those are the rules to the THREE MUSKETEER genre as exemplified by the 3 best outings to date: THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1921), THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1948) and finally THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973).

After those three versions, why would anyone want to make another?

Good question. After all the Chris O’Donnell travesty is still rank upon the innards of our collective cinematic snorters…

Well, first this is a completely new take on the whole THREE MUSKETEER story. It doesn’t follow the Alexandre Dumas precisely. This is more like D’ARTAGNAN: YEAR ONE by Frank Miller.

How so? Well, THE MUSKETEER is a reinvention on the D’Artagnan story. He is still from the same place as he always was. He still has Planchet as a man-servant. However, starting right there… things change. Planchet is more of a surrogate father/trainer… Sort of like how Tim McCanlies envisioned Alfred in his BRUCE WAYNE TV pilot script that will never see the light of day due to the insanity of one. Planchet is an old wily fox of a man. He finds it necessary to play the fool in order to gain the advantage. However, he is quite keen and resourceful. I very much prefer this adaptation of the Planchet character.

D’Artagnan is not a country boy fool… Instead he is a young man that has a direct sense of purpose and reason for becoming a musketeer. He has been training since he was a boy to become one thing… The greatest musketeer of all time. There is no camp in him, he is pure of purpose.

Now, as happens in all Musketeer films, D’artagnan meets his first fight before arriving in Paris. What ensues is possibly one of the best European styled sword fights that I’ve ever seen… and I’m a complete junkie for the form. This is superhero swordfighting… imagine if Captain America was French and set long ago… There are acrobatics and impossible leaps… no wire-fu… at least no OBVIOUS wire fu, I’m sure there were wires involved, I just couldn’t see them.

This first fight is D’Artagnan vs perhaps 5 or 6 well trained swordsmen… and… the energy from the fight makes you wonder how he’s going to top it.

After this first fight, D’Artagnan and Planchet find their way to the Musketeer’s Headquarters (my words not theirs) only to find it abandoned. It seems the Musketeers have been disbanded pending investigation of an incident we saw earlier in the film. Here he meets Porthos and Aramis. Unlike in previous adaptations, he does not end up in a duel with each of the 3 musketeers, only to unite to fight the Cardinal’s guards… Instead the story moves in different direction.

In fact, watching the film reminded me of another unfilmed adaptation of a pre-existing film property… KING KONG by Peter Jackson. In that, Peter held true to the tone and structure of the story we all know and love… But everytime we knew the characters would go right, he’d take them left… sometimes left would take them to the same place as right took them before, but sometimes it was a terrible terrible mistake and they’d have to come running back and going right to avoid certain death.

In THE MUSKETEER, this is very much the case. We focus far more on the D’Artagnan character… his story and his adventure. There is no Lady De Winter… no Constance… There is a Constance type character, played by Mena Suvari, just not Constance. There is a plotline with the Queen of France, Catherine Deneuve, and Buckingham, Jeremy Clyde… but it has nothing to do with a necklace of fine diamonds and a love affair…

The biggest departure is that Richelieu, as played by Stephen Rea, is not an evil and conniving man. I felt that Richelieu was closer to an LBJ type… A man that has started something out of good intentions, but has seen it go astray. He’s fiercely intelligent and manipulative, but not EVIL. Instead EVIL breathes in the chest of Tim Roth’s Febre… Tim Roth is doing his Basil Rathbone best here. However, where Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne never touched or harmed a hair of a single character till the final battle with Robin Hood… Here… Tim Roth’s Febre is a Death Machine… cold and uncaring. I was afraid going in that Tim would play this too close to his Archibald Cunningham in ROB ROY, but other than being a fantastic swordsman and evil… the characters are played radically different.

It’s funny… about a month ago I presented THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938) at the Saturday Morning Film Club for Kids that I host every last Saturday of the month (this month THE EXPLORERS). At the screening I introduced the film and explained the difference between swashbuckling and fencing.

There is a difference. In Fencing, there are no wild movements, everything is precise and exact. Each move has a countermove… The goal is to of course… run your opponent through, but it’s a deadly game of physical chess.

Swashbuckling is the fantasy of swordfighting and fencing. When Errol Flynn swung that sword about over his head, he was a dead man. Basil Rathbone would’ve run him through in a heart beat. It’s just like Bruce Lee’s scene in ENTER THE DRAGON with the Nunchukus, while he was sitting there swinging that shit around, somebody could’ve knocked him upside the head from behind with a big ol quarterstaff and boom… out go the lights… BUT the philosophy of swashbuckling forbids being killed will showing off… Darth Vader shall not strike down Luke Skywalker while he does a wussy backflip! While performing for the audience in the theater doing something that a passive audience would go…. "OoOOooOoOoOohhhh" over… you get to live.

Well, swashbuckling has never gotten better than Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone… Pure mano a mano swashbuckling is personified in their battle at the end of ROBIN HOOD… Why? Combination of dramatics, cinematics, performance and score… That end battle is the best because it is simply and purely the best of form.

THE MUSKETEER’s swordfights are not swashbuckling as we know it. It’s something different. How? Well, Xin Xin Xiong, famed Martial Artist and Action Choreographer has done something unique. He didn’t ‘kung-fu’ up this film. The swordfights still look to be European in form… Only, it is as if you took all of the adrenaline from those Hong Kong fights and injected it into these fights. These fight scenes… of which there are many… are shot using long shots… not just in the scope of the frame, but in the actual duration. You see D’Artagnan perform this stuff… Now, I don’t know if young Justin Chambers can actually do any of this… or if there were a whole series of doubles with CG’ed heads in place… I don’t know if Justin spent 6 months in the "Become A Badass School Of Swordfighting" or what… However, they did it… it works. It works amazing.

In all the ways that Chris O’Donnell looked oafish as D’Artagnan… As Leonardo DiCaprio looked in THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK… Here… Justin Chambers is the superhero version of D’Artagnan and he looks natural doing it.

I’ll describe just one more of the fights for you. Why? Because when this thing comes out… late this year… I would hope to keep most of the film as a surprise for ya, but this is the ‘coach fight’.

D’artagnan and Planchet are given the task to secretly escort the Queen of France to meet with Lord Buckingham to hammer out an agreement between France and England to prevent war. Febre has his men pursuing them non-stop.

Remember the scene in SLEEPY HOLLOW where it is Depp vs the Headless Horseman? Ok… Now forget it. Now, pull up John Wayne’s amazing Johnny Ringo action scene from STAGECOACH… now hold onto that one… Now instead of Indians… think French swordsmen leaping onto the full speed coach! Imagine around 25 or so men coming after D’Artagnan… NOW… instead of this just staying on a clear road… imagine taking it through a forest.. where on top of the coach you now have to leap over branches, bend beneath them… get knocked off, take somebody out, steal their horse and try to get back on board… Now mind you this is at full speed… I mean, all out full speed… scary, background blurring fullspeed… taking the camera back so you can see foreground… midground where the coach is…. And background racing by…. This sequence is absolutely breathless… It is also not the best sequence or even second best sequence in the film.

Have I mentioned the David Arnold score? No, I haven’t. Well… It is everything you would dream a swordfighting epic score from David Arnold would sound like. Completely works alongside the film… Helps incredibly well with the romance between Justin and Mena… The Musketeer theme itself is echoed throughout at various degrees of intensity… and when you begin to hear it before the final battle… It gets ya good. One of David’s finest scores… I still prefer STARGATE’s score as his best… but this is his best since.

Also… Peter Hyams’ cinematography can not be ignored here. This film does not look like ANY of the previous incarnations of the tale… Here, in this version… the interiors look like they were lit by torch lights… down a hallway with a single window, it looks like it was lit by that single window… The blacks are a deep black shadow, and the production design is lush as can be.

The various castles and locations they chose to film at are grand indeed… The final battle is quite stunning in location and how they used the location.

NOW… Is this the best Musketeer film? No. I actually don’t think there is a PERFECT Musketeer movie yet. The perfect Musketeer film would have been shot in 1941… Directed by Michael Curtiz. Starring Errol Flynn as D’Artagnan, Herbert Mundin as Planchet, Patrick Knowles as Aramis, Tyrone Power as Porthos and Alan Hale as Athos. Then Basil Rathbone as Febre, Raymond Massey as Richelieu, Bette Davis as the Queen of France, Leslie Howard as Buckingham, Henry Hull as the King of France, Olivia De Havilland as the doomed Constance, Ida Lupino as the Lady De Winter. Erich Wolfgang Korngold would do the score. It would be shot in glorious Technicolor… and be the greatest adventure film of all time. Unfortunately Jack Warner never had the script and never moved forward on this version. Maybe it was never suggested... ahhhh, to have Jack's ear in the late thirties and early forties.... Sigh....

But instead I have to settle for the four best musketeer films of all time and they are all equally wonderful in my book… just not perfect. The three I mentioned above and this one. Each one nearly 27 years apart from the other. So let's see... if my arteries don't harden too quickly, I suppose I'll see another wonderful Musketeer themed film in 2028... Can't wait!

Now a comment about the print I saw. It had some temp effects in place, and was the first assembled print, meaning that it will be played with quite a bit before the release late this year.

In the spirit of being honest and unmerciful as a certain film told me last year, there are things I would’ve preferred done in this movie.

Personally, I would have killed Mena Suvari’s character at a certain point in the movie. Why? Because I’m cold-hearted… because giving D’artagnan her at the end of the film is to solve all of his problems and make him whole. However, I am aware that killing Mena off at the end would affect the gross of this film, but it would strengthen D’artagnan’s character… intensify our hatred of Febre and give D’artagnan a reason to continue his adventures instead of settling down.

There were a couple of spots in the film where the narrative flow was disturbed by the insertion of political scenes that caused those sequences to flow badly. The scenes were good scenes, just in the wrong place… it felt awkward.

Lastly, if that one act of amazing cgi gymnastics during the carriage sequence isn’t nailed perfect in the final delivery of the effects, I hope it is cut all together because if it doesn’t look PERFECT in the final film, it would be a giant mistake in the midst of a classic action sequence that could prosper quite well without it.

Oh and one other tidbit I hated… the exploding person bit before D’artagnan rides off for the final battle… I’d cut that, it is a bit of silliness at a moment of dire seriousness and it damages the tone of the piece.

Now that I’ve said that, Peter does know about these problems and this film is a work in progress. It is my belief that when these small problems are ironed out, we will see what many will regard as their favorite Musketeer film… Though many will say the same about the Fairbanks, the Gene Kelly and the Michael York versions as well…. Personally I believe they are all for one and one for all… but perhaps that’s just my inner musketeer geek speaking.

And a word about the Title… THE MUSKETEER just sounds bland as hell. Sounds flat. The original title, D’ARTAGNAN was dumped because it was felt that many in the world would think the film was an art film… And just not know what that meant.

Welllll….

That’s your campaign right there. Introduce the name to the public. WHO IS D’ARTAGNAN? THIS IS D’ARTAGNAN! Scene of the first fight AND THIS IS D’ARTAGNAN! Atop the Carriage! AND THIS! At The Feast! AND THIS! Alongside the Riverbank AND THIS! And finally on the side of the castle tower fighting!

Give them that name, teach them the name… make the name synonymous with ACTION, ADVENTURE and ROMANCE! An aggressive marketing campaign designed around introducing D’ARTAGNAN as one of the greatest adventure heroes of all time is far better than just making people confuse this film with other Musketeer flicks in my opinion.

Of course, that’s just my opinion.

Look for this film to come out of Universal Pictures around… October, November or December… It hasn’t been decided yet.