They may only differ in their middle name, but while Paul Thomas Anderson is known as one of the lights of contemporary cinema, Paul W S Anderson has generally been far from a critic’s darling ever since Mortal Kombat. I personally am not a fan of most of his films, with the possible exception of his Solaris-as-horror-film flick Event Horizon; otherwise he has proven largely to be a technically proficient filmmaker whose empty stylishness is matched only by his cookie-cutter vision and shallow concerns.
His latest film, The Three Musketeers, however, is mostly a pleasant surprise. The adaptation jettisons all but the barest skeleton of Dumas' novel. As the now well known story goes, D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) goes to Paris to become a musketeer, meets up with the titular trio of Athos (Matthew McFadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans), becoming instant enemies with the Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), France's Machiavellian statesman and his beautiful secret agent Milady De Winter (Milla Jovovich), the latter who also happens to have been Athos' past lover. The four heroes are tasked by Queen Anne to retrieve her stolen necklace from the possession of the Duke of Buckingam (Orlando Bloom).
No, Anderson still has not changed much as a director, with a preference for handsomely-staged but emotionally uninvolving action still being order of the day for him. Wife/muse Milla Jovovich in particular gets some credibility-stretching action sequences where she apparently dodges buckshot and does flips through the air with the same ease as she did in the Resident Evil films, all while wearing a big hoopy skirt. Anderson reframes Dumas’ tale as a 17th-Century Bond movie by way of Terry Gilliam and Franco-Belgian comic books.
As derivative as that sounds, Anderson fortunately is working from an uncommonly literate script for its genre, courtesy of the team of Alex Litwak and Andrew Davies. The latter should be no stranger to fans of the BBC, being a stalwart of the station's literary adaptations as well as original series. Davies polishes the tried and true story up with peppy, self-referential, at times almost Monty Pythonesque bits of wit. The arrangement and flow of the scenes has an assured sense of grace, while always developing and fleshing out each character with a few interesting foibles and never forgetting the story's emotional core.
The final scene sets the stage for a sequel should this film do well enough. Paul W S Anderson has shown with this movie that despite his various flops in the past, all he needs is a good script. I hope it'll be a while before that sequel gets made, if just to get the script right before the cameras start rolling.