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"The Musketeer"
(Reviewed August 29, 2001)
-
Hopelessly inept. The studio is trying to sell this badly shot, horribly directed bore with the tag line "As You've Never Seen It Before." That claim is based primarily on the fact that "Musketeer" includes a few dopey "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"-type scenes of high-speed fight choreography.
As much as I disliked those silly, cheesy-looking wire scenes in the ridiculously overrated "Crouching Tiger...", they are even less impressive here. A scene in which several sword-wielding combatants slash and parry whilst dangling from ropes on the side of a castle tower is so jaw-droppingly lame it reminded me of the 1960s "Batman" TV show, in which Batman and Robin would scale building walls in scenes that plainly were shot on horizontal surfaces by a tilted camera. In "Musketeer," the ropes from which the characters dangle actually have slack in them!
Even more maddening is director Peter Hyams' talent for always finding exactly the worst location to place a camera. During virtually every action scene, it is impossible to tell who is who or what the heck is going on. Even the film's color stock keeps changing. I kept thinking this was one of those embarrassingly cheap movies from Mexico or India that pop up on obscure cable channels, the kind of travesties that make you wonder if the filmmakers think people in those countries never have had the opportunity to see a professionally made Hollywood film and won't know the difference.
Tim Roth, playing the sort of irredeemably evil bastard he probably could do in his sleep by now, is the only good thing about the movie--although his character's occasional tendency to lapse into self-referential camp is like a wink at the audience that says, "Yeah, I know this is crap." Mena Suvari once again makes the world wonder if she ever will be in another good movie, or if "American Beauty" was a complete fluke. (Also, although she has a brief sitting-in-a-bathtub scene, there is absolutely no nudity in the movie.) The title-character Musketeer D'Artagnan leaves no impression whatsoever, but whether this is the actor's or the script's fault is hard to determine.
Finally, David Arnold's score was thuddingly unimpressive "music-by-the-yard."
I see a lot of really bad movies, but there are surprisingly few that I hate so much I actually want to walk out of the theatre. ("Made" probably was the last bomb that fit in that category.) With "Musketeer," I'm amazed I even made it to the halfway point.
Back Row Grade: F
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