My Review of "The Three Musketeers 1993"

Back in the 90s I remember loving The Three Musketeers. That's when I was a preteen though. Years have passed and I haven't seen this movie for a long time. I unfortunately didn't enjoy this movie quite as much as I remembered it. That's unfortunate because I did have high hopes for this one.

I haven't read the book but I sort of want to now. This movie starts out with D'Artagnan, played by Chris O'Donnell, who is a son of a famous French military group called the Muskateers. The Muskateers are special officers assigned to protect the king of France. D'Artagnan wants to prove himself to be a Muskateer and really wants to be enlisted as one. I guess it would be the equivalent to a knight.

On his way to see the king of France he gets into these confrontations with a variety of people three of them so happen to be Athos, played by Keifer Sutherland, Porthos, played by Oliver Platt, and Aramis, played by Charlie Sheen. These three characters are the last three Muskateers that had not yet been decommissioned.

The reason why the majority of Muskateers have been decommissioned is because cardinal Richelieu, played by Tim Curry, has a dastardly plan to take the throne. With the Muskateers out of the way he is able to assassinate the king and take his place. I'm not sure how the ascension to the throne works in France so I'm just going with it.

The whole story is about how everyone finds out and ruin the cardinal's plan to oust the king and take the throne for himself. D'Argagnon and the three Muskateers will obviously become friends and it is a relatively predictable movie so we kind of know what's going to happen.

I think originally I liked how the actors portrayed their characters in this movie. Looking at the movie again I notice certain issues with the way these characters were portrayed. It was really weird to hear the actor's accents in this movie. They're all supposed to be French and absolutely everyone except for the main characters speak in some sort of similar accent. I guess you could say it's the stereotypical old European accents that we hear in period movies all the time. The main characters all speak with American accents. It was as weird as the Man in the Iron Mask with Leonardo DiCaprio. In that movie Leonardo was the only actor playing their character with an American accent.

Watching this movie so many years later I noticed that I didn't find this movie quite as fun as I remember it. There are a lot of jokes thrown in there especially from Porthos. Each of the characters have a special characteristic. Porthos is the funny one, Aramis is supposed to be a hotheaded one sort of like Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Then there's Athos who plays the stoic leader of the group.

I thought the movie really dragged quite a lot in many areas. They had to explain a lot of things in detail and I kind of got bored watching a few scenes because of their over explanation.

They had upscaled the resolution of the movie so we can see a lot more details of the movie. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. Unfortunately with all of the details we can see I noticed that the faces of the stuntmen were noticeably different from the actual actors. There are a number of times when they didn't film the right angle for the stuntmen and you would see their faces in the scene.

It's really unfortunate that a lot of these things that I see in this movie now kind of take away from the love that I used to have for this movie. I really wanted to enjoy this movie but I wasn't able to truly enjoy it as much as I did when I was a kid.

Overall, I was able to watch through the movie and smile from time to time but it really lost a lot of its luster over the years. I really wish I could have just overlooked a lot of the issues that I found but they were kind of glaring. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. I think maybe kids might be able to enjoy it but as an adult you will find this movie drags quite a bit.