The Three Musketeers (1993) is the fourth Dean Semler-shot 1990s Hollywood flick I’ve covered on DUF in 2023 (see also The Power of One, Super Mario Bros, and The Bone Collector) and fifth Semler-shot film overall (see also Razorback). In the unlikely event I ever run out of actual Australian films to blog about, I’d be quite content to simply plug through the remainder of DP Semler’s 1990s Hollywood output, a credits list with big swings that worked (Dances with Wolves), fascinating big swings that didn’t (Last Action Hero, Waterworld), and assorted trash and treasure.
Of all these titles, The Three Musketeers is perhaps the most 1990s of all. It casts Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Chris O’Donnell—not-quite-leading men who’d become major television stars in the 2000s—in heroic lead roles. Tim Curry and Michael Wincott are villains, as they are in It, Home Alone 2, Muppet Treasure Island, Congo, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Crow, etc. Following his hit song on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Bryan Adam croons on the soundtrack, accompanied by Sting and Rod Stewart. The film follows the template of Young Guns (also shot by Semler) and Mobsters, casting hot young things as old timey archetypes: there cowboys and gangsters, here Alexandre Dumas’ fabled French heroes. Finally, the film is helmed by Stephen Herek, coming off Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. He’d later helm Mr Holland’s Opus and, following his work with Disney on The Three Musketeers, their live action remake of 101 Dalmatians. In an alternate reality, The Three Musketeers could have been directed by Joel Schumacher, peppered as it is with his alumni—Sutherland (The Lost Boys, Flatliners), O’Donnell (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin), and Oliver Platt (Flatliners, A Time to Kill)—though the camp auteur would take his own pass at a French classic with The Phantom of the Opera a decade later.
Setting aside its 90s trappings, the film is, like Richard Lester’s The Three and Four Musketeers films of the 1970s and Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers of the 2010s, another stab at condensing Dumas’ dense 1844 work into a rollicking period adventure film (or two in Lester’s case) using semi-popular stars and celluloid stylings of the moment. The film also served as the 1990s Musketeer arm of the Public Domain Heroes of Yore—retread by Hollywood each decade to varying results—alongside the abovementioned Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Arthurian love triangle First Knight (the following decade would see Peter Hyam’s The Musketeer, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur, and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood; the decade after Paul W.S. Anderson’s Three Musketeers, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend or the Sword, and Otto Bathurst’s Robin Hood; 2020s TBC).
I have a preference for Lester’s films—due to their inventive direction and classy casting, particularly Faye Dunaway’s wonderful performance as Milady—and Anderson’s for its heightened world-building. But I have a soft spot for Herek’s film, having seen it theatrically in 1993 and a handful of times over the years, and the narrative beats are much the same. D’Artagnan (Donnell) comes to Paris to become a Musketeer. He makes enemies, but then fast friends, with a trio of rogue Musketeers: haunted Athos (Sutherland), devout Aramis (Sheen), and rascally Porthos (Platt). Together, they thwart the devious schemes of the Machiavellian Richelieu (Curry).
The Three Musketeers’ $30 million budget sounds modest by today’s standards, and indeed some of the bigger films of the 1990s—the Semler-shot Last Action Hero and Waterworld burned up $85 and $175 million respectively—but wasn’t peanuts: for context, fellow handsome period pieces Somersby and The Age of Innocence cost $30 and $34 million respectively, while fellow quippy action romp Lethal Weapon 3 cost $35 million. The Disney cheddar is onscreen in the film’s period sets & costumes and its action scenes, which are boilerplate and won’t get pulses racing but are sufficiently well-staged. Semler’s photography is clean and crisp, and gives proceedings the same sort of romantic glow as his Western productions. The cast are mostly game: nobody challenges or expands their personas—Sutherland is gruff, Curry and Wincott are arch, and Sheen is characteristically stiff and leaves the audience to milk the cognitive dissonance between his character and offscreen persona—but nobody embarrasses themselves either, apart from a shrieking Paul McGann. In 1998’s The Man in the Iron Mask, an objectively superior cast would essay the Musketeer roles (Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu), but the ensemble here and Herek’s direction provide a livelier take on the well-worn material.
Ben