Mena Suvari in The Musketeer (2001)

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Bad, bad, bad. The Musketeer is slow, wooden, uninvolving, sloppy, dull, choppy, tired and amateurish…and that’s me being nice. Three cartoonishly preposterous action sequences are surrounded by some of the laziest and most yawn-inspiring cinematic machinations ever captured on celluloid. All that and it just plain sucks.

Making the Grade (1984)

King Solomon's Mines (1985)

Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986)

Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987)

Honeymoon Academy (1990)

Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)

Operation Dumbo Drop (1995)

Sudden Death (1995)

What do all these movies have in common? (Aside from the fact that they all rank among the most retarded movies ever made, granted...) Would you believe they were all written by the same guy? Who'd have thought that one writer would have the range to go from a Police Academy sequel to a Van Damme action turkey? Only Gene Quintano could pull it off and somehow manage to STILL earn a living as a screenwriter. Obviously oblivious to Quintano's earlier work, producers hired him to pen yet another adaptation of Dumas' Musketeers tale. Woop.

Am I insane, or have we all forgotten the double doody assault that was Disney's The Three Musketeers and that turgid DiCaprio version of The Man in the Iron Mask? How many times does the same concept have to fail on a biblical level before producers move on to another dead author? And as ridiculously bad as those two movies were, The Musketeer burrows deep down and discovers a whole new breed of wretchedness.

A Poem

A young child watches

as his parents get slain

Then the kid runs away

And hides on the plain



He returns when he's older

And he's ready to fight

He's usually handsome and buff

and gets laid the first night



He discovers the truth

that the sheriff/priest/king

Is the villain he's seeking

for that whole 'revenge' thing



Sidekicks and henchmen

Horses and swords

cliché and contrivance

Audience bored

Sorry, I was just inspired by the sheer plagiaristic, tired familiar tedium of The Musketeer. If I told you that there was not one single, solitary new idea in this movie, you'd think I was exaggerating. You'd be extremely wrong. The plot is lifted in whole from a dozen other movies, every single character onscreen fully represents the adventure-movie stereotypes and the acting is uniformly atrocious.

Justin Chambers is vacant in the lead role and he reminds one of a Chris O'Donnell/Freddie Prinze Jr. hybrid, only with less screen presence. Tim Roth shows up to wear an eyepatch and swing a sword but I'm fairly certain that his performance here was simply footage from Rob Roy spliced in and made more dingy. Catherine Deneuve plays royalty and if you listen very carefully in one scene you can hear her mutter "Can I please have my check now?" The most entertaining performance comes from lovely young Mena Suvari, basically because she's just awful. Watching her quivery lips trying to spit out the British inflection is like watching a leech on a hot plate. I'm not saying Suvari is a poor actress; I'm just saying I've never seen her give a good performance.

Supporters of this film (perhaps all 7… worldwide) may point out the various action sequences as a testament to the film's entertainment value. They'd be wrong, because the action scenes in this film are about as realistic (and exciting) as your average Tom & Jerry cartoon. Our hero wobbles around on barrels, hangs from the rafters, leaps from horse to horse, swings from massive towers and flops around on the world's most pointless collection of ladders. If the intent of the action scenes were to invoke peals of incredulous laughter, then director Peter Hyams may end up being nominated for his work in Comedy, here. This movie even sinks so low as to blatantly steal that "Indiana Jones slide under the moving car" bit and doesn't even have the brains to make it exciting.

Boasting the silliest opening credits in recent memory and a laundry list of cinematic stupidity, The Musketeer easily ranks among the year's worst movies. Fans of "so bad it's good" filmmaking will have a field day, while everyone else in the room just slowly grows retarded.

It's astonishing (and depressing) to realize that mindless rip-offs like this get green-lit every day, while hundreds of great ideas go unproduced.

Nudity Report: Vacant young blonde Mena Suvari offers us one of the ‘tease scenes’, one in which she’s seen enjoying a bath, yet the camera never once wanders across any of her good parts. If you look real quick you may see some butt-crack…but then again, this whole movie is just total butt-crack.

IMDB Summary: 2,078 IMDb users rate this one at 4.2/10.

Box Office: Cost about $40 million; grossed just over $26 million.

DVD Info: Widescreen Anamorphic format, theatrical trailers, production notes, two featurettes.


Written by: Scott Weinberg