DVDs

The Musketeer

Region 1

Region 4

By Richard Moore

Movies based on The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas are rippers as they are usually lively, funny and incredibly entertaining movies.

My pick still has to be the films shot in the mid-1970s (The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers) as they had not only brilliant casts - Michael York, Oliver Reid, Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Roy Kinnear, Frank Finlay and Richard Chamberlain - but one hell of a lot of tongue-in-cheek.

The 1993 effort starring Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, Chris O'Donnell, Oliver Platt and Tim Curry (the best Richelieu ever) was very good, but lacked the anarchic mood of its predecessors.

However, Peter Hyam's effort The Musketeer plonks everything on its head with a pretty gritty and earthy look at the tale.

The light-heartedness of the '70s movies has been replaced by an emphasis on fight scenes choreographed by leading Hong Kong fight coordinator Xin-Xin Xiong and, surprisingly, the blending of kung-fu style battles in 17th Century France work very well indeed.

At first they take you a bit by surprise, as you half expect Jackie Chan to pop out at any second, but they truly are eye-catching events.

The ladder fight stands out in this less-than-humble opinion and the stagecoach scene involving leaping from horse, to horse, to carriage, are just unbelievable.

But, action scenes aside, I reckon The Musketeer has been given a pretty rough handling by critics and is better than you would expect from their musings.

It is a more serious look at the adventures of D'Artagnan (Justin Chambers) and the machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu (Stephen Rea) is certainly not the centre of hate that the character was in previous movies. Rea plays him with a subdued ambition rather than gleeful evil (a la Tim Curry) and the No.1 bad guy is ace swordsman and evil-doer Febre (Tim Roth). And yet Roth seems to underplay his role as well - if you compare it with his nasty in Rob Roy.

The video transfer is pretty damn good, with some superb photography being nicely reproduced on the DVD.

The colours are rich and rustically robust, although in the regular night scenes the blacks are suspect.

Sometimes the images get a bit soft, but overall nothing to stop your enjoyment of the film. The sound is both 2.0 and 5.1 and you'd be silly not to go for the 5.1.

The sound is good, but the use of the surround speakers may irritate some viewers as they may find them too overpowering.

The Musketeer seems to offer a more realistic look at the legendary tale and director Hyam's mixing of East and West gives this an interesting flavour.

Conclusion:

Movie: 80%

DVD Extras: 45%