FILM FRENZY

Michael York (far left), Frank Finlay, Oliver Reed (foreground), and Richard Chamberlain in The Three Musketeers (Photo: Criterion)

By Matt Brunson

(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE (2025). Can the promotional material really be accurate? Is this toon tale starring the powerhouse pair of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig really “the first fully animated feature-length film in Looney Tunes history”? Yup, it’s true, since all previous feature-length flicks (whether theatrical or straight to video) have either been compilation pieces like The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie and Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters (reviewed here) or live-action/animation hybrids like the underrated Looney Tunes: Back in Action and those awful Space Jam jams. What’s more, it’s hand-drawn rather than CGI-computed, which only adds to its appeal. With so much nostalgia and goodwill being generated, it’s just a shame the end result isn’t much, much better. There’s enough here to make it worth catching, but I expect any replay value won’t be as pronounced as it’s always been for the classic cartoon shorts. Writer-director Pete Browngardt and his 14(!) co-scripters and story consultants have apparently turned to the sci-fi flicks of the 1950s for inspiration, as the story involves the efforts of our heroes plus Petunia Pig to stop an alien invader from controlling the planet through bubble gum that turns its chewers into shuffling zombies. It’s always a treat to see Daffy and Porky in action, and many of the jokes do work nicely — at the same time, the rather rote plotting means that even at 91 minutes the movie can occasionally drag, and while the animated antics are certainly of the looney variety, little of it reaches the go-for-broke levels of insanity that informed the best of the vintage cartoons.

The only Blu-ray extra is the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★½

KINGPIN (1996). Sandwiched between 1994’s phenomenally successful Dumb & Dumber and 1996’s phenomenally successful There’s Something About Mary was another Farrelly brothers (Bobby and Peter) comedy that proved to be anything but successful, phenomenally or otherwise. That’s a shame, because while it falls short of the high-water mark of Mary, it’s miles ahead of the utterly imbecilic D&D, offering big laughs and showcasing a number of memorable characters. Woody Harrelson stars as Roy Munson, a former bowling ace who has long since turned into a sleazy, small-time cheat. He gets a shot at salvaging his life when he hooks up with Ishmael (Randy Quaid), a naïve Amish guy who has the makings of a bowling champion; along with a brainy beauty (Vanessa Angel), they head out to Reno to compete in a major tournament. With select gags (courtesy of scripters Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, as the Farrellys only directed this one) centered around horse mutilation, bull semen, and raunchy tattoos, it’s apparent that some stooping may be required to reach its level, but the film delivers on its comedy quotient. The actors are all aptly cast, but it’s Bill Murray who easily swipes the picture — he’s at his unctuous best as Ernie McCracken, an oily bowler with an ego as enormous as his libido. Gene Siskel so loved this movie that he placed it on his year-end 10 Best list, where it rubbed shoulders with the likes of Fargo and The English Patient.

The 4K + Blu-ray edition contains both the PG-13 theatrical version and an R-rated cut. Extras include audio commentary by the Farrellys; an interview with the siblings; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

LA VIE EN ROSE (2007). Say what one must about La Vie en Rose, but there’s no arguing the excellence of the performance at the center of this ambitious and erratic biopic about French singing sensation Edith Piaf. Piaf’s life contained enough drama to fill 10 HBO miniseries, and here director and co-writer Oliver Dahan attempts to cram it all into one 140-minute motion picture. Faithful in some instances, negligent in others, he has nevertheless fashioned a screen biography that employs some tricks of the trade (hopscotching between different decades, moments of stark surrealism) to allow this to break away from the generally staid biopic form. His film isn’t always successful, but it always remains watchable, thanks primarily to the fervent turn by Marion Cotillard. In the same manner as Jamie Foxx with Ray Charles and Reese Witherspoon with June Carter Cash, Cotillard doesn’t play the role as much as become possessed by it. From a feisty waif singing for her supper on the mean Parisian streets, to the regal songbird known internationally as La Môme Piaf (“The Little Sparrow”), to the emotionally and physically battered woman who still managed to successfully headline concerts (in this respect, Piaf and Judy Garland had much in common), Cotillard is an indomitable force as she eats, breathes, and sleeps every moment up until Piaf’s early death at the age of 47. As a movie, La Vie en Rose est bon. But as a performer, Marion Cotillard est magnifique. This earned a pair of Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Makeup.

Blu-ray extras consist of a piece on Cotillard’s transformation into Piaf and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

QUEER (2024). The headliners of the Beat Generation — among them Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Carr — may have made plenty of waves in the literary world, but none of the films adapted from or inspired by their works have exactly been keepers. That would inarguably include 2010’s Howl and 2012’s On the Road (see From Screen To Stream below) and arguably include two from William S. Burroughs: David Cronenberg’s only partly successful 1991 screen version of Naked Lunch and now Luca Guadagnino’s only partly successful adaptation of Queer. Working again with his Challengers scripter Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino has made a movie that will primarily be remembered for Daniel Craig’s superb central performance, one that absurdly failed to nab him an Oscar nomination (instead, he was snubbed in order to stick it to Donald Trump and his Apprenticeship upbringing). Craig plays William Lee, an American ex-patriate living in Mexico City. Lee spends all hours drowning in booze and cavorting with local lads, but he gains focus once he sets his eyes upon fellow American Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). While Lee hopes to enter into a passionate relationship with Allerton, the younger man remains coolly detached, ofttimes flaunting his heterosexual proclivities. As presented onscreen, William Lee isn’t that interesting a character, and it’s a testament to Craig’s skill that he’s able to breathe life into this person. Alas, the same cannot be said for Starkey, whose monotonous work never allows his co-star the opportunity to establish any connections or generate any chemistry. The ending is profoundly moving, but the path leading to it is rocky and unstable.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Guadagnino, Kuritzkes, editor Marco Costa, costumer designer Jonathan W. Anderson, and production designer Stefano Baisi; a making-of featurette; and the music video for “Te Maldigo.”

Movie: ★★½

SCENT OF A WOMAN (1992). It’s odd that neither IMDb nor Wikipedia mentions the Golden Globes’ Scent of a Woman scandal, since it was big news on the entertainment circuit (I was 27 at the time and remember it well) and even rated a front page article in the New York Times’ Arts section. Already reeling from years of bad publicity for its whorish behavior toward stars (Google “Pia Zadora Golden Globes”), the Hollywood Foreign Press Association stepped in it again when its members voted the Al Pacino flick Best Motion Picture (Drama) — beating out such heavyweights as The Crying Game, Howards End, and Unforgiven — not long after Universal had treated them to a lavish junket where they got to hang out with the star. The damage was done — lapdog Academy members dutifully followed suit and gave it a Best Picture nomination over many worthier titles (thankfully, it didn’t win the top prize, which instead went to the excellent Unforgiven). An all-over-the-map odyssey that runs a punishing 160 minutes, this finds Pacino delivering one of his hammiest performances as Frank Slade, a former military officer whose blindness has long turned him into a bellowing, boozing grouch. A young preppie (Chris O’Donnell) is hired to look after him over the Thanksgiving break, leading to all sorts of adventures in NYC. There’s exactly one lovely scene in the entire picture, when Frank dances the tango with a young woman (Gabrielle Anwar) — the rest is mawkish, manipulative, heavy-handed, and hokey, including the scene where Frank drives a Ferrari and the entirety of the excruciating climax. For the record, Pacino says “Hoo-ah!” 11 times, which is 11 times too many. Pacino won the Best Actor Oscar, with other nominations given for Director (Martin Brest), Adapted Screenplay (Bo Goldman), and (sigh) Best Picture.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition consist of interviews with Brest and co-editor Michael Tronick.

Movie: ★★

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973) / THE FOUR MUSKETEERS (1974). Although it’s often been stated that these two swashbuckling yarns based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel The Three Musketeers were filmed back-to-back — as were the cases with Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, Monte Hellman’s The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (see From Screen To Stream below), and the sequels to Back to the Future and The Matrix — that’s not quite accurate. When producer Ilya Salkind set out to film The Three Musketeers, he had in mind one three-hour-plus epic — when scheduling didn’t work out, only then did he decide to break the material up into two movies. (As the cast and crew didn’t know they were making two movies but being paid for only one, this directly led to the Screen Actors Guild creating a clause to forevermore protect against this.)

The Three Musketeers is not only the superior picture, it also ranks among the finest of all adaptations of a Dumas property. Director Richard Lester brings the same sense of tomfoolery that he had earlier applied to A Hard Day’s Night and would later apply to Superman II, and it proves to be an appropriate and intoxicating approach. Michael York is winsome as d’Artagnan, the naïve farm boy who journeys to Paris planning to become a Musketeer; his clumsiness immediately results in confrontations with actual Musketeers Athos (Oliver Reed), Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), and Porthos (Frank Finlay), but they quickly recognize his skills and innate goodness and accept him into the fold. D’Artagnan falls for a royal seamstress named Constance (Raquel Welch), but he’s called into action once the duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) orders the equally devious pair of Count De Rochefort (Christopher Lee) and Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) to carry out a plan that will strengthen his position in the king’s court. The slapstick shenanigans prove to be a natural fit for this boisterous material, although Lester and scripter George MacDonald Fraser take care not to shortchange either the action or the romance.

The Four Musketeers continues the saga, this time taking a slightly more somber approach as Milady de Winter seeks revenge against d’Artagnan. The merriment is still on view, particularly when Porthos is involved, but the political intrigue thickens and a few key characters meet gruesome deaths (one certain to be a shock to anyone not familiar with the Dumas source). This one isn’t as crisply paced as its predecessor and d’Artagnan has already stopped growing as a character, but it’s nevertheless a satisfying way to wrap up the saga. Much of the cast from the first two pictures would reunite in 1989 for The Return of the Musketeers (a loose reworking of Dumas’ 1845 novel Twenty Years After); it barely made a ripple and didn’t even play theatrically in the U.S., and it’s not included in this new 4K + Blu-ray edition from Criterion.

Extras consist of making-of pieces from 1973, 2002, and 2025, and theatrical trailers.

The Three Musketeers: ★★★½

The Four Musketeers: ★★★

21 GRAMS (2003). Whiplashing between past and present, writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)) has fashioned an absorbing drama that’s as much about loneliness, retribution, and redemption as it is about matters of the heart. Much of the movie’s power comes from viewers being allowed to slowly connect its pieces, so suffice it to say that the story centers on three individuals — a gloomy college professor (Sean Penn), a suburban mom (Naomi Watts), and a born-again ex-convict (Benicio del Toro) — whose lives are all affected by the same car crash. As narrative fragments bombard us and the storyline circles back on itself repeatedly, it becomes apparent that the melodramatics are necessary to forward the film’s exploration of the way life and death constantly step on each other’s toes. Del Toro earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his anguished emoting, while Penn is even better here than in his Academy Award-winning stint in the same year’s Mystic River. Yet it’s Watts (nabbing a Best Actress Oscar nomination) who’s most commanding, unleashing a whirlwind of emotion as a former party girl whose complete transformation into a model of upper-middle-class respectability is cruelly upended by a loss that leaves her trapped in her own purgatory.

The only Blu-ray extra is a making-of featurette.

Movie: ★★★½

WAYNE’S WORLD 2 (1993). On December 10, 1993, Paramount and Disney weren’t exactly operating on a wing and a prayer — more like a schwing and a prayer — as each studio released a sequel to a 1992 box office hit and waited for comparable profits. But stateside audiences were far more interested in Mrs. Doubtfire and The Pelican Brief than Sister Act 2 and Wayne’s World 2, with the films respectively grossing $57M and $48M — a far cry from their predecessors’ $139M and $121M. At least Sister Act 2 has gained (thanks to its musical content) a fervent following over the years, whereas Wayne’s World 2 is still deemed not worthy by pretty much everyone. It’s an odd situation, considering that WW1 and WW2 are practically the same movie in terms of airhead protagonists who remain stagnant, a constant breaking of the fourth wall, the feeblest excuses for connective narrative tissue, and incessant attempts to hijack the zeitgeist via quippy catchphrases. The plot deals with Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) trying to mount a concert called (what else?) Waynestock even as Wayne worries that his girlfriend Cassandra (Tia Carrere) is having an affair with her record producer (what genius thought to cast Christopher Walken in a comedy and then hand him a straight-man role?) and Garth stumbles into a relationship with femme fatale Honey Hornée (a game Kim Basinger). The Kenny G gag is brilliant — and any cast that includes Charlton Heston, Rip Taylor, Aerosmith, and Jim Morrison (well, sort of) is worthy of a salute — but too many bits (like an endless spoof of The Graduate’s finale) fall flat. Bottom line: This one’s superior to the first picture (reviewed here), but not enough to move the needle a discernible distance.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include audio commentary by director Stephen Surjik and a making-of featurette.

Movie: ★★

FILM CLIPS

THE ALTO KNIGHTS (2025). The Alto Knights reunites the writer (Nicholas Pileggi), producer (Irwin Winkler), and top-billed star (Robert De Niro) of GoodFellas, but don’t look for Martin Scorsese, as even he presumably knew this was one mob movie too many. Instead, Bugsy director Barry Levinson takes the reins of a motion picture that would play far better if it didn’t always feel like a “Greatest Hits” compilation. Still, the hits keep coming, meaning there’s nevertheless some entertainment value to be mined in this fact-based drama about the rivalry between gangsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. De Niro plays both mobsters, a decision brought about by either the actor’s desire to have some fun or the filmmakers’ desire to save on one extra salary. Certainly, this stunt casting is not for the benefit of the audience, as it isn’t dynamic enough (or even unusual enough) to rate a salute.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★½

CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994). From writer-director Wong Kar-Wei comes this intertwined two-parter about cops in love. The first story, in which a policeman (Takeshi Kaneshiro) gets involved with a mysterious woman (Brigitte Lin) in a blonde wig, is sturdy enough, but the real keeper is the second vignette. That’s primarily because of the performance of Faye Wong, a real delight as a food-shop employee who finds herself attracted to a cop (Tony Leung, soon to become Wong’s MVP) still pining away for his ex-girlfriend.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include a 1996 Moving Pictures episode featuring an interview with Wong, and deleted scenes.

Movie: ★★★

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

CAT PEOPLE (1942). Even with challenges from (among others) Psycho and The Wolf Man, it’s likely that 1942’s Cat People is my all-time favorite horror film. The first of producer Val Lewton’s series of acclaimed terror tales from the 1940s, it remains a masterpiece of the genre — no less than Martin Scorsese has stated that the movie is “as important as Citizen Kane in the maturation of the American cinema.” It was a commercial bonanza for RKO, earning a then-whopping $4 million return on its $134,000 shooting budget and paving the way for Lewton to retain creative control on his follow-up pictures. The alluring Simone Simon stars as Irena, an Eastern European immigrant who meets and marries an American architect (Kent Smith). Forced to remain celibate because of an ancestral curse that will turn her into a panther if her emotions are aroused, she grows jealous of her frustrated husband’s attention toward a co-worker (Jane Randolph); this in turn leads to two classic set pieces, one involving the other woman’s walk down a dark city street and the other focusing on her nocturnal swim in an indoor pool that’s surrounded by menacing shadows and an even more menacing growl. Simon’s Irena makes for one of the most tragic heroines ever seen on screen — a woman who, through no fault of her own, is deprived of the love she hungrily seeks. The movie’s strong sexual currents and adult subject matter (when you get down to it, this is a story about impotence), amplified by ace director Jacques Tourneur and scripter DeWitt Bodeen, further lift it above the realm of the usual spook show. Here’s a picture that offers plenty of food for thought: as a treatise on sexual hang-ups, as a study of American xenophobia in the face of Eastern European exoticism and eroticism, as a roiling examination of the ego/superego/id push-pull, and as a textbook film-school example of brilliant use of light and shadows. This was followed two years later by the unusual but worthwhile The Curse of the Cat People (reviewed here), but don’t bother with the dopey 1982 remake (reviewed here), notable only for David Bowie’s terrific song “Putting Out Fire.”

Movie: ★★★★

EXCALIBUR (1981). Based on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (the go-to source for most works about the Knights of the Round Table), Excalibur is director John Boorman’s bold and bloody retelling of the saga of King Arthur (Nigel Terry): his birth as a bastard child, his ascendance from squire to king, and his death in one-to-one combat. This ambitious undertaking manages to incorporate all the highlights from the legendary tale, not least being the omniscient presence of the sorcerer Merlin (Nicol Williamson), the adulterous betrayal by Arthur’s wife Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) and best friend Lancelot (Nicholas Clay), and the villainy of Arthur’s half-sister Morgana (Helen Mirren) and her son Mordred (Robert Addie). Boorman and co-scripter Rospo Pallenberg vigorously punch across the gritty battles, operatic tragedies, and mischievous magic that combined form the crux of the tale, and the picture looks spectacular thanks to the Oscar-nominated cinematography by Alex Thomson and the Oscar-worthy (but shamefully non-nominated) costume design by Bob Ringwood. Williamson’s turn as Merlin is a tad too buffoonish, but there’s an undeniable thrill in catching early work by then-unknown actors Gabriel Byrne (as Arthur’s ruthless father, Uther), Patrick Stewart (as Guenevere’s noble pop, Leondegrance), and Liam Neeson (as the knight Gawain).

On a related note, in spring 2010, I went to London to stay with my then-fiancée/now-wife Natalie, who was there for a year earning her Masters at Roehampton University. During the week I was there (actually more than a week, since I was one of the 10 million travelers whose air flight was cancelled due to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland), we checked out many cool venues, including the London Film Museum. Among the exhibits on display at the time were ones dedicated to Charlie Chaplin memorabilia and the costumes of Excalibur, the latter pictured above.

Movie: ★★★½

ON THE ROAD (2012). There was enough of a hint of all that jazz to director Walter Salles’ 2004 effort The Motorcycle Diaries, a look at the early years of Che Guevara, to signal that he might have been the proper person to bring Jack Kerouac’s landmark novel to the big screen. Instead, this look at the Beat Generation ends up missing too many of its own beats to ever succeed. Enlisting his Motorcycle writer José Rivera as his accomplice, Salles approaches Kerouac’s raw, restless, and spontaneous work in such a staid and conservative manner that the movie might as well have been a lesser Merchant-Ivory production from the team’s declining period in the late ’90s. Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund deliver underwhelming performances in the two roles that simply must engage audiences from the get-go. Riley is aspiring writer Sal Paradise (the character based on Kerouac himself), who longs for the freedom of the open road, while Hedlund is irresponsible hedonist Dean Moriarty (aka Neal Cassady), who joins him on many of his cross-country adventures. Salles and Rivera chart the men’s encounters in acceptable vignette fashion, but there’s very little sense of the thrill of discovery in what’s presented on screen, with the filmmakers dutifully checking off each CliffsNotes highlight before moving on to the next one. William S. Burroughs appears here in the form of junkie-poet Old Bull Lee, played with the proper measure of eccentricity by Viggo Mortensen. And Kristen Stewart is fine in her too-few scenes as Dean’s first wife, the teenage Marylou; ditto for Kirsten Dunst as Dean’s second wife, Camille, Amy Adams as Old Bull Lee’s spouse, and Steve Buscemi as one of the bisexual Dean’s johns. These supporting players all add color and dimension to an otherwise sterile piece, not unlike interesting footnotes found peppering the pages of a dull college textbook.

Movie: ★½

THE PLAYER (1992). The movie that most deserved the Best Picture Academy Award slot swiped by Scent of a Woman (see above)? That would absolutely be The Player, which the Golden Globe voters at least had the sense to honor with the Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) trophy. One of the great films of the 1990s, this lacerating look at Hollywood also served as director Robert Altman’s comeback after spending the previous decade in self-imposed exile making micro-budgeted indies and TV movies. Employing the same level of acidity displayed in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., Altman and screenwriter Michael Tolkin (adapting his own novel) focus on Griffin Mills (Tim Robbins), an assertive Tinseltown executive who finds his job security threatened by the studio heads and his life threatened by the person sending him ominous, anonymous postcards. A murder is committed, and this sets the stage for further shots at the film capital, from its unscrupulous denizens to its obsession with happy endings. The opening eight-minute tracking shot is justifiably celebrated, as is the obscene number of cameos by actors and directors appearing as themselves. Buck Henry pitches The Graduate: Part II, Alan Rudolph is mistaken for Martin Scorsese, and Burt Reynolds gets hilariously profane; you also get Peter Falk, Jack Lemmon, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, Cher, and approximately 50 others. As for the featured players, Lyle Lovett nearly steals the show as a detective with an affinity for Tod Browning’s Freaks. The Player did earn Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing (Geraldine Peroni).

Movie: ★★★★

THE SHOOTING (1966) / RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (1966). Like so many other filmmakers, actor Jack Nicholson and director Monte Hellman cut their teeth making movies for Roger Corman, and here are a pair that were shot simultaneously in just a span of six weeks. Atypical for Corman productions — they wallowed in existential angst rather than genre thrills — these two Westerns had a troubled release history but eventually became cult items, of a piece with Hellman’s 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop.

Produced by Hellman and Nicholson and written by Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces), The Shooting is a cryptic, almost dreamlike (nightmarish?) drama in which a pair of cowboys, the sharp Gashade (Warren Oates) and the dimwitted Coley (Will Hutchins), agree to escort an unnamed woman (Millie Perkins) in her quest to, as Gashade figures, “kill someone.” Frequently cruel and always manipulative, the woman seems cut from the finest femme fatale/film noir cloth, yet even she’s saintly when compared to Billy Spear (Nicholson), the sneering hired gun who joins the outfit. Oates and Perkins are excellent in this unusual oater with an abrupt ending certain to thrill some viewers while infuriating others.

In addition to his acting and producing duties, Nicholson also wrote the screenplay for Ride in the Whirlwind, which isn’t as surreal as The Shooting but retains that picture’s gritty feel and downbeat demeanor. Nicholson, Cameron Mitchell, and Tom Filer star as three honest cowhands who become poster children for the “wrong place, wrong time” axiom when they spend the night on the property of a gang of thieves led by Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton, billed here as Dean Stanton). When a bloodthirsty vigilante mob swoops down in the morning, the innocent cowpokes get lumped in with the guilty criminals, and suddenly the trio finds itself on the lam. Perkins also turns up here, playing a young woman whose family gets swept up in the sordid ordeal.

The Shooting: ★★★

Ride in the Whirlwind: ★★★

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (2011). Break out those No. 2 pencils, cuz it’s time for a pop quiz. Which line of dialogue is not spoken in this adaptation of the Dumas classic? A) “What would you like me to put on your headstone? ‘Little shit’?” B) “Your horse took a dump on the street.” C) “Find my sword. It’s the one that says ‘Bad Motherfucker’ on it.” The correct answer is C, although given the other liberties taken, nothing included here would have surprised me. I’m hardly a stickler for movies remaining faithful to their source material, but this Musketeers is a travesty, even worse than the dopey ’90s version that thought nothing of casting Charlie Sheen as Aramis and Chris O’Donnell as d’Artagnan. Director-producer Paul W.S. Anderson is best known for those Resident Evil movies starring his real-life wife Milla Jovovich, so it’s hardly unexpected that he stages this as a slick video-game adaptation, complete with an excess of CGI and a fondness for those slo-mo Matrix-style action sequences that wore out their welcome somewhere around the time Kelly Clarkson was winning the first American Idol championship. Jovovich is showcased in many of these interludes, as her Milady de Winter, heretofore only known for scheming and blackmailing behind the scenes, has been transformed into a kick-ass warrior. Yet at least she possesses a smidgen of pizzazz; not so dull Logan Lerman, whose demographic-friendly casting as d’Artagnan — he’s a young American cast adrift in a sea of European actors — makes me wonder why they didn’t go ahead and cast Justin Bieber in the part. Faring even worse is Gabriella Wilde as his love interest — her line readings prove to be even less animated than those of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL. Clearly, Anderson and his scripters felt like simple swashbuckling antics would be boring to modern audiences, so in addition to Milady’s reincarnation as Lara Croft, a couple of airships have been added to the narrative. The film’s conclusion sets up a sequel, so if it belatedly gets made, I expect the Orient Express and at least one Aston Martin to figure in the action.

Movie: ★