Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, ask about it wherever you do your book shopping!)
Kung Fu Musketeers
Action movies were popular throughout the 20th century, but they were often formulaic and mostly the genre didn’t get much respect before the 1980s, when blockbusters by master filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg and James Cameron elevated the action genre to the top of the heap. Of course, swashbucklers in the musketeers vein had always been action-oriented, but by the late ‘90s, especially after the high-profile failure of Cutthroat Island (1995), they were widely considered to be outdated. How to juice them up? At least two American and European films released in 2001 had the same idea, that of combining high-energy Asian martial arts with the standard European swordplay. In practice, results were mixed, but as the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show had already demonstrated, this was a good idea when done well.
The Musketeer
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 2001
Director: Peter Hyams
Source: Universal DVD
Though the title mentions only one of them, this is in fact one more screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers (1844), though its plot seems inspired more by the 1993 Disney treatment than by Alexandre Dumas’ novel. To be fair, it does try a different take on the classic story, presenting d’Artagnan (Justin Chambers) not as a naïve but brash youth from the provinces, but rather as a young hard-ass who comes to Paris with a ready-made revenge motive and who is already smarter and tougher than Athos (Jan-Gregor Kremp), Porthos (Steve Speirs), and Aramis (Nick Moran). This is an approach that could work with a lead actor of grit and charisma—but not, alas, with a bland nonentity like Chambers, who just can’t carry it off.
Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is just as forgettable, with two exceptions. Top-billed Catherine Deneuve seems to be enjoying the role of Queen Anne, especially when they briefly turn Her Majesty into an action hero—and though no longer in the glory of her youth, when she smiles, the camera still loves her. Then there’s Tim Roth, who gleefully wallows in the part of the cartoonishly menacing Febre, outright pulling the villain rug out from under Rochefort and Richelieu. Speaking of the latter, even mediocre Three Musketeers adaptations often have a Cardinal Richelieu who’s well cast and well played, but not here: the usually fine Stephen Rea gives us a rather pallid and uncertain political mastermind, though that’s largely because the role is written that way. But the script is weak for everybody, despite screenwriter Gene Quintano’s attempts at Marvel-style quippery. It doesn’t help that the villains’ political conspiracy is laughable, worse than that in Disney version it emulates.
Upon theatrical release, this film was sold on the basis of its action, choreographed by Hong Kong fight director Xin-Xin Xiong, and though the mass swordfights are lackluster, in fact d’Artagnan’s set-piece duels are quite good, and provide probably the only reason to watch this movie. The combats draw upon the Silent Era swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks as much as they do modern kung fu, but that’s all to the good. The best known duel from The Musketeer is the storeroom fight on the balancing ladders, a sequence Xiong “borrowed” from Once Upon a Time in China (1991), in which he’d acted as Jet Li’s stunt double. (Side note: Xena: Warrior Princess borrowed the ladder fight first, and arguably did it better.)
And that’s all it has, really. The Musketeer is just mediocre in almost every respect; Cinema of Swords recommends you give it a pass.
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Rating: ****
Origin: France, 2001
Director: Christophe Gans
Source: Universal DVD
This enthusiastic genre mash-up is absurd, over-the-top, and a real good time, thanks largely to its striking and uninhibited direction by Christophe Gans, who with reckless glee mixes historical adventure with gothic horror, martial arts action, barbarian fantasy, slasher-flick jump scares, and a murder mystery. It’s set in 1764 in the region of Gévaudan in south-central France, where a wolf-like creature has been preying on people in the forests and countryside. This strange and horrific beast has evaded hunters and soldiers alike, so the king sends his leading naturalist, the Chevalier de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), to help track it down and describe it scientifically once it’s slain.
Nothing goes to plan. Arriving in Gévaudan with his Iroquois warrior friend Mani (Mark Dacascos), Fronsac finds terrified peasants, incompetent officers, decadent ancien régime aristocrats, a (completely ahistorical) clan of barbaric hunters, and a calculating Catholic priest, but nothing and no one who can help him get a line on the rampaging wolf-creature, despite the ostensible cooperation of the Morangias family, the leading local nobles. The Count de Morangias (Jean Yanne) is dismissive, his intense hunting-obsessed son Jean-François (Vincent Cassel) is strangely ineffective, his ingénue daughter Marianne (Émilie Dequenne) is coolly flirtatious, and his neighbor the Marquis d’Apcher (Jérémie Renier) decides that when they’re not hunting the night creature, Fronsac and Mani should reside in a palatial and opulent brothel teeming with semi-nude prostitutes, a place that has no business existing anywhere smaller than Paris itself.
If the above sounds complex and talky, it is, but fortunately none of it is really serious, and trust me, there’s plenty of action in between the debauchery and verbal fencing with the aristos. There’s trouble with the barbaric hunter clan, fights are frequent, and besides using swords, big knives, and flintlocks, everybody knows kung fu, apparently just because that’s cool. (Which it is—somehow it works in context.) Fronsac falls in love with the dewy Marianne, but courting her doesn’t stop him from banging the sublimely ridiculous Sylvia (Monica Bellucci), a spooky prostitute in the brothel who reads tarot cards, gives Fronsac excellent drugs, and just might be a ruthless assassin working for mysterious patrons when she isn’t carving her name in Fronsac’s skin and then licking his blood from the blade. Hot? You bet.
Gradually, after weeks of pursuit as the season turns to frozen winter, the truth about the wolf-beast starts to come out, and Fronsac begins to understand what he’s up against. And since the monster was crafted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, it’s fearsome and convincing. As a protagonist, Fronsac is that bane of historical fiction, the character supposedly of their time who actually has the attitudes and personality of a contemporary modern, so he isn’t taken in by 18th-century provincial superstition, not he. Plus, the killer conveniently uses special ammunition in his anachronistic carbine-pistol, so anyone with a brain who finds the murder bullet will know whodunit—but really, there’s only been one suspect all the time. The whole thing goes on a bit too long, but the final fight, arranged by Jackie Yeung and featuring crazy weapons like bladed fighting fans and extensible chain-swords, is totally worth the wait. Stylish and fun.
Next Week: Zu Du You, as we check in on Honk Kong cinema’s return to wuxia in the wake of Crouching Tiger. Don’t miss it!
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.
Copyright © 2024 Lawrence Schick. All rights reserved.