Anytime people see Leonardo DiCaprio in the cast of a film, they expect it to be some of the most profound levels of filmmaking that they would be watching. I cannot blame them, Leo has been consistently making films that stand out amidst the crowd for decades now, from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to Titanic, The Aviator, The Revenant, and even The Wolf of Wall Street and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There’s always a sense of narrative storytelling that you can’t find anywhere else, but that’s what makes The Man in the Iron Mask different. It’s not a period epic or a narrative tour de force, but rather a good old-fashioned entertainer!
How to Download The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)
You can download the film from a digital store. You can also stream it. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice.
The Movie Review
Under King Louis XIV’s authority, Paris is going hungry. It’s difficult to say exactly what the issue is, but it might be that King Louis XIV is a little too crazy and irresponsible for his own people, and instead lives out his life in lavish exuberance. So, the three musketeers come up with a scheme to end the king’s awful reign in order to free Francia from his tyranny. However, the main obstacle in their path is D’Artagnan.
It takes forever to get into this, despite the excellent plot. However, all of the buildup in this film leads to the typical depiction of the King being a jerk, while the Three Musketeers are the awesome heroes. Of course, unlike most superhero movies and entertainers in the 2020s, films had more delicate and complex narratives that required some lengthy build-ups, but it got a bit hard to sit through with this film. The plot is fantastic once the movie gets going, though!
A lot of the characters’ arcs are developing seamlessly, the side characters are put on display quite often so you don’t forget who they are while you’re watching the film. Of course, there are a lot of fencing scenes here, and most of them are quite embarrassing, to say the least. However, the production design here is flawless, you can see the high budget coming through quite well. The setting and clothing create the perfect mood, drenching you in the world of Francia.
Acting
I did appreciate the acting in this film, there are some very big names present here and each of them ends up doing the best they can while putting in as little effort as possible. Gabriel Byrne, as D’Artagnon was one of the highlights of this film, and he did a pretty good job in the role. However, the real winners here were Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich, with Gerard Depardieu giving one of the funnier performances out of the three, and he might be the best actor out of them all.
It’s surprisingly sad to say that Leo was one of the weaker performers in the film, even though he did his job well enough, he was a bit off-putting as Philippe and too boring as Louis. Along with that, half of the characters simply spoke in whichever dialect they preferred, while the other half had a thick French accent.
The Visuals
The cinematography here was outstanding though, that’s something I can say for this film with utmost confidence. The big-budget brought with it the best camera operating crew, along with the cinematography talents of Peter Suschitzky. He drowns this film in colors, reds and blues and golds, everything your eyes could ever process. This makes the film extremely pleasing to the eye. The soundtrack by Nick Glennie-Smith is a bit lacking though, it could have been done much better with more orchestral-sounding music rather than the slow fiasco of violins and cellos that it kept piling up.
The Verdict
In conclusion, I’ve been a bit disappointed by films of this sort before, films that look so much more than what they eventually end up being. However, The Man in the Iron Mask was something I always saw as an entertainer rather than something noteworthy to be talked about, it’s a fun film that will engage you in lavish set designs and costumes, with very little substance other than its fossilized retelling of the Three Musketeers story by Alexander Dumas.
