The Three Musketeers 3D

Directed by Paul WS Anderson. Starring Logan Lerman, Milla Jovovich, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, James Corden, Christoph Waltz 12A cert, general release, 109 min

This appalling version of the old Dumas workhorse will bore everyone, writes DONALD CLARKE

YES, THAT’S right. The images are in stupid 3D. Well, at least something in this unnecessarily ghastly film exists in more than one dimension. Come to think of it, calling Paul WS Anderson’s monstrosity mono-dimensional is something of an insult to such respectable mathematical quantities as length, height and breadth. The film comes across more as an indefinable singularity. It exists outside space. It has no substance. Oh, you get the drift.

How did we get here? There are, you might reasonably assume, few more stubbornly indestructible tales than Alexandre Dumas's great The Three Musketeers. Douglas Fairbanks shone in a silent adaptation. Richard Lester directed a delightfully hip, bifurcated version in the mid-1970s. Tom and Jerry found fun things to do with the twisty story. Surely even the wrong Paul Anderson – the Resident Evilbloke, not the Magnoliaman – couldn't make base metal from this narrative gold. Watch and learn, people.

The picture doesn’t exactly begin promisingly. But the opening scene does, at least, suggest that Anderson is not going to spend too much time soiling the source material. Within seconds of the lights dimming, one musketeer has risen from a Venetian canal dressed in a black ninja costume with twin swords jutting above either shoulder. Some argy bargy happens aboard a gondola and we are propelled several years into the future.

Mr Anderson seems committed to creating his own, entirely original class of catastrophe. Expect space ships and zombies and Ferraris that turn into submarines.

It doesn’t work out that way. Rather astonishingly, after that sideswipe of an opening, the film settles down to retell substantial swathes of Dumas’s novel. You remember how it goes. Young D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman, boring), a naive farm boy, heads for Paris with dreams of becoming a musketeer. Upon arrival, he has three successive mishaps with three easily riled swordsmen and agrees to meet each for a duel in the same busy square at about the same time. This antagonises the authorities and, after seeing off the King’s guards, the four men become fast friends.

D’Artagnan has just met the Three Musketeers: Athos (Matthew Macfadyen, dignified), Aramis (Luke Evans, invisible) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson, charismatic).

A good deal more of the book makes an appearance. The superhumanly dull Milla Jovovich (Mrs Wrong Anderson) appears as the evil, calculating Milady. Christoph Waltz, already our era's default period villain, has some fun turning Cardinal Richelieu into the world's first Nazi commandant. The reliably awful Orlando Bloom, playing the Duke of Buckingham, swallows his lines with the unenthusiastic lassitude that has hastened his rapid descent from heartthrob to potential Strictly Come Dancingcontestant.

Yet, despite those frequent nods to the familiar story, the tone of Anderson’s film could not be more different to that of the novel. Neither paying any attention to historical accuracy, nor making any effort to create a fully imagined parallel universe, this cinematic hooligan just crudely shoehorns any number of eye- wateringly stupid anachronisms into the already perfectly serviceable story.

Marvel as Jovovich weaves her body round threads that look like laser beams. Gape as airships duel in the skies of Versailles. Groan as – giving the impression the cat has just sat on the DVD player’s remote control – Anderson randomly and inelegantly switches between slow motion and regular speed during the useless action sequences.

We end up with a revoltingly tasteless, badly acted, lazily plotted farrago that further insults the blameless viewer by ending with a terrifying gesture towards potential sequels. Please, no.

Second-worst film of the year to date.