I watched a bad movie today. It is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Watching bad movies that is. I revel in the terrible plots, paper-thin characters, cheesy effects, and wooden acting. It fuels me. I love them in a way that I can’t quite describe, or feel about bad games or music. To me, bad films deserve to be recognized, talked about, and maybe occasionally ridiculed. This one is no exception.

Paul W.S. Anderson movies all kind of look the same at a certain point, no matter the subject matter. Lots of gratuitous slow-mo, lots of unnecessary and poorly implemented CGI, and lots of Mila Jovovich being unnecessarily sexy when it is completely uncalled for, and more than a little badass. So giving him The Three Musketeers p[property to play with, an iconic story of the heroes of France, is more than a little disappointing to see. What’s more, giving the role of D’Artagnan to the baby-faced Logan Lerman is questionable.

But then again, I don’t like any of the characters in this movie. I felt like an extra from Spaceballs, surrounded by assholes. I didn’t know who to root for because every single member of the main cast is just a huge douche. Our main character keeps threatening to kill people over the smallest slights, bragging, boasting, and hitting on every woman that he sees along the way. The three musketeers have a servant that they practically abuse, and there is a too long joke about birds pooping on his face, and it seems like most of the other scenes that he is in come down to us laughing at him because he is fat.

The King is incompetent, the Cardinal evil, England bad, and Mila constantly plotting. Really, the only person that I had any amount of sympathy for was the Queen for the terrible situation she is forced into, and how it seems that everyone else in the movie wants to use her for something.

Early on there is an action scene that I legitimately thought was going to turn out to be an elaborate dream sequence for us to scoff at. A young boy fights dozens of enemies while hundreds of townspeople clap and cheer from above. He fights a dozen men at once while flirting with one of the queen’s attendants, and when all four of the musketeers band together, they leave dozens of bodies in their wake, members of the Cardinal’s elite guard, and they suffer absolutely no consequences for it. By the end of the movie, they have killed hundreds, started a war, stole a flying airship, fought in a giant flying battle, fought on top of a chapel, and more.

And absolutely none of it makes a lick of sense. They have a scene of Mila stripping to her underwear and flipping around a bunch for absolutely no reason, because it’s “sexy”. It is dumb, a masturbatory circle jerk of a movie, a quest to see how much dumb shit and explosions that they can pack into a movie about sword fights and intrigue. It has no purpose other than to take money from people based purely on the name of an established and revered franchise. It isn’t a very good movie at all.

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Tags: Why Did I Watch That?, The Three Musketeers, Mila Jovovich, Paul W.S. Anderson