Movie Gazette

The puffy shirts, the feathered hats, the presumably bad breath – it can only be one story: The Three Musketeers! We’ve seen them plenty of times on screen before, of course, in the likes of Richard Lester’s swashbuckling-good 1973 effort, the 1921 version starring Douglas Fairbanks, and – a personal favourite of mine – the pooch-based cartoon series ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds’ (anyone else remember the cracking theme tune?).

This Disneyfied up-date doesn’t star any dogs in the lead roles (more’s the pity), but it does add a new dimension of its own – boredom. In fairness, it starts fairly well. We’re introduced to a young D’Artagnan (Chris O’Donnell), all sky-high confidence and crappy hair, as he upsets a bunch of French dandies before making for Paris to fulfil his dream of protecting King Louis (no, not the orang-utan) as a Musketeer. And believe me, when you see the king you’ll realise just how much he needs it – played by Hugh O’Connor as a complete and utter pansy, he’s more than a little reminiscent of Hugh Laurie as Prince George in ‘Blackadder the Third’.

The trouble is, when our fresh-faced perm-headed hero reaches the capital, he finds the Musketeers have been disbanded and only three rebels – in the form of a sorely mis-cast Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Oliver Platt(!) – remain. Together, the four of them gang up against the evil and power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (a camp-as-ever Tim Curry), who seems intent on putting the “Gay” into “Gay Paree”. Ooh, pardon!

The story stutters rather than surges to its conclusion, the dialogue stinks to high heaven, and the casting department got practically every decision wrong (Curry makes a destitute man’s equivalent of Alan Rickman’s brilliant Sheriff in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’, Platt is ridiculously overweight, and O’Donnell is consistently rubbish). Aside from a couple of semi-decent sword-fights, director Steven Herek (who also helmed the ‘Young MacGuyver’ TV series – which I’ve never seen, but sounds fantastic) delivers a major let-down.