Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Tom Burke, Luke Pasqualino, Santiago Cabrera, Howard Charles, Peter Capaldi, Tamla Kari, Maimie McCoy, Hugo Speer, Ryan Cage, Alexandra Dowling, Will Tizard, Roger Aston-Griffith, Abigail Rice, Bo Peraj, Daniel Gosling, Dave Florez, Nicholas McGaughey, Oliver Cotton, Chris Barnes, Philip Brodie, Joe Wredden, Flip Webster, Emily Beecham, David Verrey, Alex Austin.
There doesn’t seem to have been a great action adventure in the void that is Sunday night for ages. Lots of great detective drama but no real daring, swords, and the thrill of a well written narrative interlaced with seeing some of the great heroes of literature being bought to life like never before…that is until The Musketeers.
For a set of heroes that were conceived by a man who found himself falling from favour during the time of Napoleon, The Three Musketeers have largely become associated with comedy, through some really great films in the 1970s starring the late great Oliver Reed, Roy Kinnear and Michael York or even a Disney version, which despite having a great cast, which included Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, Oliver Platt and Tim Curry, felt as if it was paying homage to the great films of the 1970s rather than breaking any new ground, too slick and too lavish by half.
The Musketeers though already feels different even after one episode of the ten part series. The three men playing the life-long friends in the King’s service are seen as being as part of the 16th Century and not some Hollywood film set, there is no garishness, no need for the cleanliness, the over production and near sanitisation that always gets dragged like a comb through wet hair on any major film. The Musketeers is dirty, it has lived on the streets and read Alexandra Dumas to within an inch of its paperback life and come baring a gift of a programme that on reflection is a million times better than some of the television offering suggested by the channels on the last day of the week.
Whilst you would never ever knock the likes of Oliver Reed and Roy Kinnear for their time on a great set of films, it was undoubtedly played for laughs, the effect of which has never really done justice to the words of Alexandre Dumas in a book about honour and political intrigue in France in the 17th Century.
With Tom Burke finally being given a chance to shine as a major lead in a television series, something that has been woefully gone amiss for far too long, his portrayal of Athos is charming and devilish, a real rendering of the love lost musketeer and alongside Howard Charles and Satiago Cabrera as his friends in arms, the series will surely be worth watching. Where the programme succeeds greatly over any of the film adaptations is in its choice of casting in Cardinal Richelieu. Tim Curry aside in the Disney version, this great religious zealot and conniving man of the cloth has never really been captured with any real despotic vehemence. In Peter Capaldi, soon to be the next incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, all the years of great screen presence, of perfecting the darkness that can inhabit a man, all comes tumbling out and finds the perfect host for his marvellous ability.
The Musketeers might just be the find of 2014, Sunday night will never be the same again.
The Musketeers continues next Sunday.
Ian D. Hall