Action. PG-13. 1 hour, 42 minutes. At area theaters.
Whatever your relationship to the Alexander Dumas story about Athos, Porthos, Aramis and musketeer intern D’Artagnan, there’s a word for the latest screen edition of “The Three Musketeers”: whatthehell?
Seriously: What the hell? Those who favored the callous aggravations of the recent Guy Ritchie-directed “Sherlock Holmes” may forgive the grating, chaotic brand of storytelling and filmmaking here more easily than I.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson brings to this costume party the same battering-ram sensibility he brought to the ongoing “Resident Evil” franchise. The adventure classic is now a steampunk’d migraine. Clashing swords and court intrigues no longer suffice. This movie exists for its digital airborne sailing vessels and deadly retro-futuristic flamethrowers.
Somewhere in there, you’ll find a trio of cynical, out-of- work musketeers, the casualties of “budget cuts,” as one of them notes early on.
“I thought you’d all be a little more . . . heroic,” says D’Artagnan, played by a haircut in search of an actor in search of a performance named Logan Lerman.
Leonardo da Vinci, we learn, has drawn up plans for a deadly flying “war machine,” a combination of dirigible and seafaring galleon. In the prologue, Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) sneak into Venice on a special-ops mission. Their accomplice, Milady de Winter, is played by Milla Jovovich, who is married to the director, which explains that.
Written by Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies, this horsey version plays as though any two people involved in its making failed to have a single conversation with any other two people.
Rewatch the 1973 Richard Lester “Three Musketeers.” That impudent entertainment had little to do with Dumas, but it had a spark to call its own. This latest version is “le pits.”
