The Man With The Iron Mask - Review

First off, I should mention that the music that is used in the trailer is the same music from Braveheart. I know that both films have the same writer, but still, that's pretty lazy. In fact, that is a great word to describe this movie. Lazy. Sloppy comes to mind also, but this film just reeks of laziness.

So the story we have here is about King Louis XIV played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He is a selfish and quite terrible king. While his people are starving and rioting in the streets, he is enjoying life in his magnificent palace with all the food he could dream of. Or worse yet, is willing to send a man off to war knowing that they would not come back just so that he could have the man's wife, now widowed, for a night of lustful sex.

The solution to getting rid of this foul creature who just happens to rule the land? Well, replace him with his brother of course. Yes, the three musketeers all join forces once again to replace King Louis XIV with his twin brother who is unaware of lineage and is trapped in the palace's dungeon with an iron mask to hide his resemblance to the king.

So we have some pieces in place. We have a premise that is interesting enough with the whole doppelganger ordeal and is set in a time period that is intriguing, at least in my eyes (I've always found stories about kings and castles and knights and battles fascinating). We even have a great cast with Leonardo DiCaprio as King Louis XIV and his brother (although he still can't do accents) and we have Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gérard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne along for the ride. Add in beautiful set-pieces and great production design and you have all the right tools for an entertaining movie. And while yes, I did enjoy myself while watching this movie, unfortunately, I found myself forgetting what I had seen the next day. In other words, this film is not impactful in any way.

The problem was that the main storyline isn't introduced to us until what feels like half the movie. We get scenes of talking and talking and talking and talking and it felt like watching an educational video that would be shown during a grade nine history course about the French revolution. As a matter of fact, the only reason why I bought this movie at a flea market a couple of weeks ago was that I remember seeing it in French class in high school. While the premise of the story sounds really interesting, it takes way too long to establish itself. Once Jeremy Irons said out loud, "I have a plan" I had to do a bit of a double take and say out loud, "Oh, that's right. I'm watching a movie with what is supposed to be a flowing narrative." Until that point, we have simply characters talking about things that we have knowledge about. It doesn't help that the characters names all sound the same and they refer to each other off-screen.

While the scenes in the palace did look and feel rather elegant, the rest of the movie felt fairly cheap. The scenes with the musketeers discussing their plans in small houses or small alcoves of the dungeons or even in a field somewhere, it all looks very cheap. Maybe it's because Randall Wallace is a screenwriter and not a director, but it felt rather amateur.

However, I can forgive bland cinematography and a somewhat unfocused narrative if there is a strong emotional connection with the characters and the story. Is it here? Yes it is, but I don't think it's because of the characters themselves, I think it's because of the actors portraying them. I can list off all the actors in this movie because they are famous and charismatic, but I couldn't tell you anything about their characters, even their names.

So while this movie isn't terrible by any means, it surely isn't anything great either, or even necessarily that good. We had all the parts together for a great tale about resurrection and justice, but what we got was an unfocused, bland tale that just happens to have Leonardo DiCaprio in it.