"The Man in the Iron Mask"

Stephanie Zacharek reviews 'The Man in the Iron Mask,' directed by Randall Wallace and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Gabriel Byrne, John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Mar 13, 1998 | It's bad enough when Gerard Depardieu -- as the aging, bumbling, unkempt Musketeer and lover-of-life Porthos -- shows up early on in "The Man in the Iron Mask" with a gaggle of buxom cuties fluttering and giggling around him. When he farts loudly, sounding a reveille that tells the world he's a man who lives life with gusto, things get just a little worse. But when he asks rhetorically, "So, are there more important things in life than a good pair of tits?" his diction is so incomprehensible that he may as well have one in his mouth, and the jig is up. Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is "The Man in the Iron Mask," the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"

If you're a 14-year-old girl, the answer is probably Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the movie's lead. DiCaprio has done some wonderful work in the past five years -- most notably in 1993's "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" -- but it's his merely marginally engaging star turn in "Titanic" that's suddenly raised his stock in teenville, and thus in Hollywood. The release of "The Man in the Iron Mask" is a miracle of timing: Could there be a better way to cash in on DiCaprio's locker-pinup cachet than to toss out another one of his vehicles just as most of his new young fans are deciding that maybe eight viewings of "Titanic" -- OK, make it nine! -- are enough for now?

But no matter which way you cut it, "The Man in the Iron Mask" is a stinker: I can't imagine any of the 14-year-olds I know being taken in by it, Leo or no. It's a shame that director and screenwriter Randall Wallace -- who wrote "Braveheart" -- couldn't have done more with Alexandre Dumas' story, rich as it is with action, intrigue and irony, not to mention the startling romantic flourish at the end. But as it is, "The Man in the Iron Mask" is merely scatterbrained and graceless. Wallace must have wanted it to move quickly, and the film's schizophrenic editing shows it: Senselessly melodramatic quick cuts make mincemeat of the story -- particularly at the beginning, it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on as the action jumps inexplicably from luxurious castle exteriors to dank, nasty prisons to austere Musketeer headquarters. The point, of course, is that the story is supposed to unfold gradually, but you're left with so many questions early on -- What's this I hear about treasonous Jesuits? And what do they have to do with the starving masses? And why doesn't somebody just slap this snotty king Leo? -- that it's easy to get thrown out of the narrative when it's scarcely begun.

The story goes something like this: It's 17th century France. There's a bad Leonardo (King Louis, snotty in his leonine tresses and fancy bathrobes) and a good Leonardo (Phillipe, Louis' twin brother, who was spirited away at birth and lived in hiding until Louis, fearful that Phillipe might steal the throne, had him thrown into the Bastille, locked in an iron mask). The three original Musketeers -- Aramis (Jeremy Irons), Athos (John Malkovich) and Porthos (Depardieu) are still kicking around the kingdom, pretty much retired -- except Aramis is the secret leader of a rebel Jesuit faction that opposes the greedy, selfish, preening king.