Close your eyes.  Picture a magical and wonderful world where all dreams become reality, and reality becomes reality-er.  Each morning you are greeted with piping hot coffee, fresh strawberry pancakes, and blowjobs.  Each night is filled with the screams of beaten creditors as they’re paraded through the streets.  It truly is a world of delights, and as such, in this world I have been tasked to adapt a classical piece of literature into a movie.

Journey with me, if you will, passed my writing desk and into my mind.  Seriously enough with the pancakes and blow jobs. I don’t have all day.  Are you with me? Excellent.  Recline in the comfy La-Z boy of my mind and hear the pitch.

Roots.  Yes, Alex Haley’s classic Saga of an American Family.  Only the whole story needs a bit of work.  For instance, who’s going to follow a story about a guy named Kunte?  Toby’s nice.  We’ll keep Toby.  Toby is washed ashore on the beaches of America after a savage mutiny aboard the pirate ship of which he was captain.  Now Roots chronicles the generations of a family struggling against oppression and despair in a bid to survive, but fuck that shit, I’m going to focus on the chase scenes.  Toby and his hot ass Latino sidechick Harriet Tubs make their way to the north, escaping a wily Master Lord Calvert with their hilarious antics.  A bunch of stuff happens, there are some explosions, and the movie culminates with Toby snapping John Wilkes Booth’s neck after an intense wire fight.  Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Well imagine someone did that to the Three Musketeers, and to top it off put Tim Roth in a very silly hat.

17th Century France was well known for it's Polyurethane fiber mills.

The movie jumps right into the action, with the immediate death of D’artagnan’s parents at the hand of Febre (captain of the Cardinals guard) before the opening credits even start to roll.  I guess they wanted to jump right into the character development and story, and what better way to do it, than with the murder of some parents.  Worked for Batman!

D’artagnan is raised by Planchet, a former sword master who is known throughout the land as having worn the same exact outfit for 15 years or more.  This large, stocky, lumbering swordsman taught D’artagnan to sword fight in the same manner that he himself must have, through high flying acrobatic flips.

So D’artagnan goes to Paris to join up with the Musketeers with Planchet in tow, and along the way gets into a fight with 6 men in a tavern.  Planchet warned him that the place had bad food and bad company, but D’artagnan insists that he’s only going there for breakfast.  Didn’t the guy just tell you the food sucks?  After soundly whipping the men with the aforementioned acrobatics, one man holds Planchet hostage.  D’artagnan shows that his ability to think is as sharp as his blade by telling the hostage taker that he has six men outside.  I thought that the point of taking a hostage is for dealing with situations where you are facing overwhelming forces, but I guess the one guy able to easily beat six men isn’t enough to scare him.  It takes the threat of six more men outside.  He lets Planchet go, rather than bothering to actually look outside the window and see if there are in fact six men out there.

So as this goes on, we learn that the Cardinal is working on making the king look like an asshole in front of the king of England.  The Cardinal has also disbanded the Musketeers in order to ensure that his attempts would go unhindered.   Upon arriving in Paris, D’artagnan meets up with the other musketeers, who are so unimportant in this movie that it’s almost pointless to name them.  D’artagnan and the two or three musketeers end up saving Treville (the captain of the Musketeers, who was framed by Febre) from prison. D’artagnan accomplishes this by knocking on the door of the prison and offering the guards a huge barrel of wine.  When the guards realize this is probably a trap, he blows up the barrel which is in fact filled with explosives.  If he was going to just blow up the barrel anyway, why knock on the door?

Treville shows his leadership qualities by threatening to go directly to the king if they try to arrest him again.  Whoa Whoa, slow down there old timer.  There’s no reason to get crazy.  Maybe you should start the “resistance” off a bit slower like politely requesting the Cardinals guards not arrest all of your men without cause, or baking Febre  a cake with the words “Sorry we’ve had trouble becoming friends” written in icing on top.

Next the musketeers botch one of the Cardinals plans by foiling an attempted hobo coup, or at least, by transporting the king and the royal family to safety.  Now might be a good time to mention to the king that the Cardinal has disbanded the only group of people set to protect his life.  You know, while they’re protecting his life.  Maybe they could have even hinted at their ideas of the Cardinals intentions.  I guess that would make too much sense.

Later on after avoiding capture by the Cardinals guards, D’artagnan meets up with the Cardinal through a window (Batman?) threatens him (Batman?) and disappears without a trace (Batman!?).

It turns out Febre was in the Cardinals closet during the whole meeting.  When asked whether he wanted D’artagnan dead, the Cardinal said no, due to D’artagnan’s popularity with the king.  This is a classic stupid move that antagonists always go for in movies.  They always decide not to kill the guy who’s giving them the most problem, for some bullshit reason like he’s too popular, or he’s not a threat.  They knew where D’artagnan lives, and he returns there every night.  They have the power of the churches private army at their command, and they can’t figure out how to just kill a guy in his sleep.  The excuse regarding the king liking him too much is just rubbish.  Why would the king care about a single musketeer when he hasn’t cared about the disbanding and unlawful arrest of the entire personal guard?

D’artagnan flees Paris with the queen and a chambermaid in order to “call in the cavalry” but is pursued the entire way by an actual cavalry.  They shake off the pursuit, but are later on caught when D’artagnan decides that the best time to go skinny dipping is during an important quest while being hunted by an army of enemies.  While the Queen is being incarcerated, Febre actually proves that he knows what it means to be a musketeer by actually using a musket to shoot Treville.  D’artagnan returns to find the place in chaos, and rallies the musketeers to go save the queen.

The Musketeers must never have been involved in any military campaigns, because they make a few mistakes when storming the castle.  First, when storming a castle secretly at night, it is not a good idea to start screaming the charge while you’re still several hundred yards away.  That has a tendency to alert the guards with the canons on the wall.  After countless unnecessary musketeer deaths later, they arrive at the gate to find Planchet’s carriage waiting.  It’s funny that the carriage filled with explosives was able to make it to the gate without sustaining a scratch, but the musketeers lost half their men.

The musketeers all manually push the wagon around and towards the gate so that they can aim their canons.  While they’re doing this, musketeers are getting picked off left and right.  It might have made more sense to have parked the wagon backwards to begin with, or hell even had the canons pointing from the front of the wagon.  They finally blow a hole through the gate and rush in to attack the guards, all of whom have swords (rather than muskets) ready to meet them.  The queen and tavern wench decide to alert D’artagnan of their position by dropping a huge ass bust from the top of a 5 story high tower.  You’re doing a great job nearly killing the people who’ve come to rescue you.

D’artagnan believes the stairs take way too long to climb up, so he shoots a grappling hook (BATMAN?!) up to the top of the tower and climbs up. Guards at the top of the tower decide to repel down to sword fight him while hanging from ropes, rather than just shooting him.  Who taught the guards to fight while repelling?  How often does that need come up?  Why’d they even have the repelling equipment ready?

He reaches the top of the tower just in time to endanger the queen who is shot at by Febre.  Fortunately the tavern wench is there to take a bullet.  It’s also fortunate that she is bullet proof, considering as how she is not only alive after being shot, but that there is no lasting wound visible later.  Febre waits for D’artagnan to have a lengthy discussion with her, and chooses not to use that time to reload and shoot D’artagnan.  Now the fight is on.  They go down the easily accessible stairs, and arrive into what can only be described as a ladder factory.  Why is it whenever there is a sword fight in movies, they always have to be balanced on opposite ends of a seesaw?  A few minutes of really badly done wire fighting later and Febre decides to abandon all the skill he had shown at sword play until now, and just charge straight at D’artagnan with the sword pointed out.  He’s killed and they cut to the standard ending for these kinds of movies; a star wars coronation, and a wedding carriage rolling off into the sunset.

Aside from all the stupidity inherent in the movie, with the cliché responses and resolutions to obvious plot holes, The Musketeer commits a very serious crime.  They take a story, and gut everything that was good about it.  Then they add as much flash and fight’s as they can, without any regard to style or substance.  There are some amazing sword fights that can be achieved through standard fencing that don’t require kung fu mastery.  The movie is akin to adding Xtreme to the beginning of a word to make it sound more Xciting.  This movie is nine years old, and I’m sure Hollywood’s learned from its mistakes and won’t try to remake a classic so horribly again.

Fuck.

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