THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (51)

Directed by: Randall Wallace

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Gerard Depardieu

The Pitch: Alarmed by the young King Louis XIV's cruel and arrogant behaviour, the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan reluctantly start thinking about a palace coup - and discover that the king has a long-lost twin brother.

Theo Sez: "I know that to love you is a treason against France," says D'Artagnan. "But not to love you is a treason against my heart". Let no-one associate wit or originality with this lively, rather slapdash version of a well-worn tale, from its relentlessly banal dialogue to the Rent-A-Mob crowd scenes (at least the chopping-up of vegetable missiles - "I'm on my way to a salad" - as featured in the trailer seems to have been dropped en route to the finished film). Musketeer fans will wince to hear Athos referred to as Ay-thos, or to see the complex Aramis reduced to The Brainy One (not to mention Porthos farting and belching to denote Rabelaisian "earthiness") ; and the plotting seems terribly casual - for one thing, couldn't the breach between D'Artagnan and the Musketeers have been avoided if they'd only told him their plans? That it still sort of works (for this viewer) is mostly down to Wallace's penchant for using the historical-adventure genre - as in BRAVEHEART - for feverish soap-opera : all the talk about fathers and sons (and mothers and sons, and brother against brother) is hokey but it gets to you, both because there's so much of it and because the actors make it work. DiCaprio especially makes the derisive laughter stick in the throat (it's tempting to start a post-TITANIC backlash, but also unfair : he's still a miraculously expressive actor), his hollow-eyed wariness resonating through the film's best sequence, the masked ball where the pretender tries to act "royal" (i.e. heartless) ; the film doesn't deserve him, and doesn't really know what to do with him. His King Louis isn't evil or demented (as in the exuberant Douglas Fairbanks version, THE IRON MASK), merely arrogant and selfish, a bit like the petulant child-queen of AMISTAD - yet even that can't be allowed : his love scenes, which should be predatory and vaguely creepy, get the standard slushy score poured on top, as befits a major heart-throb. Let no-one associate the film with courage either ; but it's reasonably diverting.