I wish I could say “Slumdog Millionaire” had a little something to do with this (remember what the kids called themselves), but Paul W. S. Anderson’s decision to adapt “The Three Musketeers” yet again for the big screen seems to be solely based on the fact that the title lends itself easily to the 3-D format. Expect it to be called “The 3-D Musketeers.”
It’s hard to see the appeal, even with the gimmick. I’m not sure many moviegoers are still interested in the swashbuckling trio and their pal d'Artagnan. It’s been a long time since Hollywood’s last take on the Alexandre Dumas classic. That version, starring Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris O’Donnell, and featuring a popular song by Sting, Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, was anything but a blockbuster hit.
Five years later, another of Dumas’ Musketeers stories, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” was barely embraced by audiences, despite starring Leonardo DiCaprio fresh off of his fatal "Titanic" cruise. The James Cameron flick was in its 13th week at the time “Iron Mask” opened, and had yet to be bumped from the top of the box office chart. Then there was 2002’s “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a non-Musketeer-related Dumas story that similarly took in only a modest gross at the box office. It's almost as though Dumas adaptations are... cursed?
Even stranger than the idea to revisit the Musketeers is the idea of Anderson, a filmmaker associated almost entirely with science fiction, being the one to take it on. Given that he’s responsible for “Resident Evil,” “Death Race,” “Mortal Kombat,” “Event Horizon” and “Alien vs. Predator,” it’s hard not to expect he’d bring the story into either outer space or some dystopian future.
Then again, maybe what “The Three Musketeers” needs is a fresh approach? The success of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise means that audiences may now be ready to accept other swashbuckling tales. They just need some similarly entertaining performances, and maybe a bit of fantasy. Anderson, who scripted this new version with Andrew Davies (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), says this will be some kind of modernization where “corsets and feathered hats don’t take center stage,” but where there’s still the period setting.
As long as it's not a steampunk treatment, a la "Wild Wild West." We’ll just have to wait and see what he means by that and hope that it looks cool in three dimensions.
Will you go see a 3-D “Three Musketeers” for a chance to see fencing swords popping off the screen? What other literary classics should be given the 3-D treatment?
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