The Three Musketeers (2011): To say that this film plays fast and loose with the source material is like saying the Pope is just a wee bit Catholic - gross understatement. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (some of his work I dearly love, like “Event Horizon”) steps away from the “Resident Evil” franchise to direct this revisionist-steampunkish version of the French classic, complete with dueling airships, wirework, and slo-mo special effects as Porthos (Ray Stevenson), Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and D’artagnan (Logan Lerman) fight against the forces of the sort-of-evil Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), his henchman Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen), the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), and the Lady de Winter (Milla Jovovich, Anderson’s wife and star of his “Resident Evil” flicks). Nary a Frenchman to be found in the cast. The character names are the same, as are some of the personality traits, but this has just the barest resemblance to the plot of the original. The dialogue is ATROCIOUS (I‘m fairly certain that even in a movie as anachronistic as this, Richelieu is not going to say “yup“ when asked a question), ridden with clichés (Buckingham speaks nothing but). The musketeers themselves are good, but Walz is slumming here (and looking very bored in the process), Bloom is over-acting his rear off, Mikkelsen phones it in, and Jovovich seems wildly out-of-place. The film plays for laughs that aren’t there, with a goofy subplot about King Louis XIV seeking relationship advice from D’artagnan (Freddie Fox plays Louis, and he is one of the bright spots in the film, even if his Louis is a wild caricature). Watchable, but mindless and generally disappointing. Woodchuck sez, “You’ve been warned.”
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