The Three Musketeers is the newest movie by Paul W.S. Anderson, written by Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies, based loosely (very loosely) on Alexandre Dumas‘s novel and starring Logan Lerman, Ray Stevenson, Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, Milla Jovovich, Orlando Bloom, Christoph Waltz, Juno Temple, Mads Mikkelsen, Freddie Fox and Til Schweiger (for about 3 seconds).

Plot:
D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) has dreamt of being a musketeer since about forever. Now he finally gets to go to the big city to fulfill said dream. But the first thing he does instead is get into trouble with Cardinal Richelieu’s (Christoph Waltz) henchman Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen) and then he makes duel dates with all three of the most famous muketeers: Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans). But before they really get down to it, they have to unite against the Cardinal’s men and are quickly drawn into a plot devised by the double-to-quadruple agent Milady (Milla Jovovich).

The Three Musketeers is just as you’d expect it: a movie that leaves most qualities behind and concentrates entirely on fun. It’s awesome.

If you ignore or accept the general question “who thinks about the three musketeers and figures what that story needs is airships?” and just go with it, this movie is pretty damn perfect. It’s the kind of movie that has a subtitle telling you that you’re in Da Vinci’s vault, while you hear a voice over telling you that you’re in Da Vinci’s vault. It’s epic.

The actors are permanently locked in ham-mode, though the clear favorites in that duel are Orlando Bloom and Christoph Waltz. Who the fuck knew that Bloom could be funny? I mean, on purpose? I really can’t choose between the two of them. And Milla Jovovich apparently got the direction to do everything sexily. The way she contorts her body sometimes – it would do any “sexually liberated” comic book heroine proud.

And if the general hamming wasn’t enough (through which, btw, Juno Temple still shines. She’s wonderful. And Freddie Fox is someone to watch out for as well), they get dialogues like this one:

Random girl caught in musketeer attack: “Who are you?”
Aramis: “I’m not really a priest.”
Girl: “And I’m not really a lady.”
Aramis: “I have 10 minutes.”

And they have Matthew Macfadyen’s voice. I don’t know if they made it even lower in this film (because I never noticed it that strongly before), but honestly I didn’t care since I was too busy fanning myself. Wow.

The only thing I really couldn’t get behind was the treatment of the musketeer’s servant. Poor guy. But then again, the musketeers are assholes in the original as well – maybe they just decided that this would be the one thing they’d be faithful to in the movie.

Summarising: Fun. So much stupid fun.