Early billing (even I saw a preview and that says something) for the movie gave it good promise for filling this desire. Choreographer Xin Xin Xiong was supposed to "mix Eastern and Western styles, fusing 17th century swashbuckling with samurai action" (according to previews and press material released by Universal). Unfortunately the result was disappointing at best, and highly contrived (like the ladder scene, flashed often in the previews) at worst. There wasn’t much of the standard beauty of the traditional duel, and in the action scenes, the swords seemed to get in the way more than anything else.

The plot of The Musketeer followed Dumas’ classic story inasmuch as it contained a wet-behind-the-ears would-be Musketeer named D’Artagnan (Justin Chambers), three comrades named Porthos (Steven Speirs), Aramis (Nick Moran), and Athos (Jan Gregor Kemp), and the city of Paris (a set in California). The Musketeers themselves didn’t get much screen time, and despite getting a lower billing, D’Artagnan’s romantic interest Francesca (Mena Suvari) had more screen time and was, to use the concept loosely, a much more developed character.

Now, to be fair, having dialogue that reads like a plot summary isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nobody went into this movie expecting Shakespeare. And the most positive feature of the movie was the throwaway one-liners that several major characters (most especially Francesca) were given.

The evil Cardinal Richelieu was duly portrayed by Stephen Rea as a character who would have been much more subtly evil had he been able to control his henchman Febre (Tim Roth), the real villain of the movie.

Roth and Chambers did, however, fill the fundamental requirements of being fairly hot guys and equipped with swords. That, combined with the number of things that exploded, burned down, or burned down while exploding, made the movie not a total loss (given my initial expectation).