Review: Return of the Musketeers


It’s 20 years since The Four Musketeers were last seen (well, these particular ones at any rate), but some things have not changed. Constantly duped Queen Anne (Geraldine Chaplin) is once again in trouble, with the duplicitous Cardinal Mazarin (Philippe Noiret) plotting against her, with the help of the nasty lady swordsman Kim Cattrall, the vengeful daughter of Milady De Winter. So, D’Artagnan (Michael York) and the other musketeers (Oliver Reed’s Athos, Frank Finlay’s Porthos, and Richard Chamberlain, whose reluctant Aramis now has a cushy gig as Abbe and dares not leave his post for swordplay and derring-do).

 

Meanwhile, former Richelieu ‘living blade’ Rochefort (a wasted Christopher Lee) is also back, and forced to bide his time playing second fiddle to his daughter Cattrall. C. Thomas Howell plays the uber-naive, studious adopted son of Reed’s Athos.

 

Tired, uninteresting 1989 Richard Lester (“The Three Musketeers”, “The Four Musketeers”, “Help!”) sequel set 20 years after the first two films, is a poor excuse to bring everybody back together (and taking way too long to do so, I might add), rehashing the plot from the first two with a few minor alterations and name changes; Noiret’s duplicitous man of the cloth is in for Charlton Heston’s Richelieu, Cattrall and Howell play offspring of other characters, Jean-Pierre Cassel’s cameo as Cyrano De Bergerac is a lame excuse to bring the actor back to the series, Bill Patterson’s King Charles is merely a replacement for Simon Ward’s Duke of Buckingham etc.

 

There are OK moments (some of the action is well-done), but not many, and no raison d’être for the whole thing. A particularly demeaning role for Lee (who tries to make something of it, but his first couple of scenes shamefully frame him as though he were a useless extra), most of the other returnees look bored, and only Cattrall (surprisingly lively, in perhaps her only decent film performance until “The Ghost Writer”) manages to grab the audience’s attention (aside from a cute cameo by Billy Connolly as a caddie).

 

An especially sad end for Lester regular (and damn-near beloved national treasure) Roy Kinnear, who died in an equestrian accident on set (he had played Planchet in all three films), this waste of celluloid is dedicated to him. The knowledge of his tragic death casts a pall on an already pointless and drab experience. There’s just no fun here, and no originality. The screenplay is by George MacDonald Fraser (“The Three Musketeers”, “The Four Musketeers”, “Red Sonja”, “Octopussy”), and based on Alexandre Dumas’ Twenty Years Later.

 

Rating: C

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