Author's judgement:
The cloak and dagger genre has given the history of cinema interesting, entertaining, sufficiently significant pages of its historical era. We mention only a few titles: Robin Hood, Captain Jack Sparrow, the legend of Zorro. One particular saga concerned the titles of swordsmen in the court of the French king. This week's film is the latest in this series: The King's Musketeers by director Giovanni Veronesi. The story is simple: the group of four historians reassembles Athos, Portos, Aramis and their leader D'Artagnan who, on behalf of the queen, must carry out a secret mission during the war against the Huguenots.
The wait was to see a comedy film, a kind of light Christmas cinepanettone, alternative to the usual Christmas vattelappesca. Overall we were looking for a relaxed and fun way to spend a couple of hours at the movies. The result is bordering on disastrous: surreal, ungrammatical, inconsistent dialogues. Screenplay without head or tail, it is not clear in any way if it wants to be a film, in fact, of "genre" or a parody of the same. It's not comical, it's not adventurous, it's not historical and it's not modern (the ending is absolutely incomprehensible). Not to mention when, at a certain point, a backing track of a famous rock song starts. It only seems to understand that the actors (Sergio Rubini, Pierfrancesco Favino, Rocco Papaleo, Valerio Mastandrea and Margherita Buy) enjoy playing roles that are unusual for them but nothing more.
The debate on the theme of Italian cinema and its crisis is always heated. Those who write to us are usually very critical and have not failed to underline the difficulties in bringing out texts, subjects and directions worthy of attention, capable of going beyond the usual narrative timbres all centered on one's navel. When this happens, as in the case of this film, the why and the why of Italian cinema seems to emerge clearly. Too little, too scarce, too light the whole system. There is a strong suspicion that, behind films of this kind, there is an excessive ease of accessing contributions and production support which, otherwise, would hardly see the light of day. Sorry for two reasons: firstly because the "cloak and dagger" genre deserves more respect and attention, secondly because a good opportunity has been lost in this period to offer a title that the public usually expects: simply fun. It seems that the director took many years to put this work together. Sin.
