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UCFC Movie Reviews La Femme Musketeer Year: 2003 (miniseries) Director: Steve Boyum Sword Master: Peter Hric Assistant Sword Master: Kim Turney Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Michael York, Nastassja Kinski, Susie Amy Review by V. Bjerreskov (2004 September 08) Take Disney's The Three Musketeers, move the action a generation forward, and add some feminism, and you have La Femme Musketeer. It's a real challenge to find one original plot point in this film. I'm not kidding when I say it's an update of Disney's take on Dumas. The addition of feminism, a royal intrigue, and a kidnapping subplot stretch this film to three hours (add commercials, and you have a four-hour TV miniseries), but I recognised the story from the outset. Not to say it isn't amusing, because it is. I was laughing most of the time, and not always because it was so outrageous. The actors, director, and writer don't take themselves or their material too seriously, which would have been the kiss of death. Instead, it becomes an amusing romp through familiar story-lines. The film is television quality, with all that entails, but Boyum does a good job driving the story through, although he does use slow-motion action a bit more than he perhaps should. The cast is excellent, and they really saved some of the more trite sequences. The younger set, led by Susie Amy as Valentine D'Artagnan, are perhaps not the best actors in the world, but they're good enough to pull it off, and they certainly aren't the worst actors I've seen do TV movies. The older generation, with Michael York as D'Artagnan, Gérard Depardieu as Cardinal Mazarin, and John Rhys-Davies as Porthos (as if he wasn't born to play him sometime!), do a lot of justice to their roles. I didn't really buy Nastassja Kinski as Mme Bolton, the femme fatale, though. She appeared to be very weak and frail, especially compared with Rebecca de Mornay from Disney's version. Still, overall, the casting and acting were good. Fencing was ever-present; after all, it's a Musketeer film! Form was definitely more flashy than correct, and in the initial scenes of the film, the actors seemed to have trouble with the weight and momentum of their weapons, but that did seem to change over the course of the film. Gratuitous use of slow-motion, close-ups, and gymnastics moves aside, it certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been,. As long as you absolutely, positively do not take this film seriously, it's a pleasant way to waste three hours. Back to Movie Reviews Home  |  About Us   |  About Fencing   |  Links  |  Photo Gallery Image Bank  |  Reviews   |  Fencing Fun  |  Contact Us