Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

mjbeasty It was an okay movie that flowed okay. There weren't too many low action points. It was just rather dragged out. Maybe they should have taken out the second captureand freeing of iron mask. Main thing that bothered me for the first sixty minutes was the different accents and dialects. Leo, the captain, and the three musketeers all have very different accents in "Paris." One out of the 5 was French. And I don't care if they were all mid-western American, but having one semi-french sounding guy makes it obvious that the other are not.Thanks

John Brooks This is just as bad as my title sounds. Just a terrible equation. Cast full of great actors, really all great actors I mean: Jeremy Irons, Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne, Malkovich, DiCaprio... and neither of them can even make this lift above the ground an inch. It's incredibly dull, flat, utterly predictable, tedious... every action scene is like a caricature of an action scene, every dialog a caricature of a dialog, everything is cheap, rushed, from start to finish, the one-liners, the constant stares into the camera/long pauses between lines attempting the dramatic... in many places, if not the whole thing, it looks like a film which screenplay/story was thought out some night by some bored film people who just wanted something to make to merely entertain their then idly bored selves. Really. It's so badly made it's immediately beyond credible and confirms its atrocious global quality throughout. It's a little bit like a joke if you will. Oh, and the plot twists. This is really just one of those films that are so bad they're entertaining.

rzajac There's a sort of pall that hangs over The Man in the Iron Mask. It's a feeling of... mediocrity. I know that no expense was spared in production. It's a fine specimen of movie entertainment. Sets, costumes, cinematography, editing. And, of course, big headliners.The one thing that feels skimped on is story management. It feels dilettante-ish; like simple karmic elements tinker-toyed together and intended for delectation by a 5-year-old snuzzled into bed with his teddy bear. Transitively, the actors--especially the headliners--come off like their tongues are weighed down by the knowledge that they're reading fay, simplistic storytelling. Somewhere between the standard script and the interp (the direction, also, mayhaps?), a ball has been dropped.After viewing, I thought, OK: What's a good counter-example? A flick that has all the same technical finery, including roughly the same period, but also possessing a picaresque narrative, with character study, as deep as it is broad, would be... Barry Lyndon.If you're thinking, "That boring old fossil?!?!" then I'd just say... OK, maybe "Iron Mask" is more your speed, and... godspeed! But I see the technical finery of a flick as merely a substrate. The story is everything. I do expect both (good technique and narrative depth), but actually am more respectful toward flicks that, even if they're technically lacking, at least deliver on the mythic level in a satisfying way.So I give this one a '6' for the technique, but I can't creep that any higher.If you like a simple intrigue fable and lots of swashbuckling, "Iron Mask" will do.

Anssi Vartiainen A film loosely based on the third Musketeers novel by Alexander Dumas, who in turn adapted the story from actual historical events surrounding King Louis XIV and the eponymous masked prisoner of his. The story goes that France is struggling under the rule of its new king, Louis XIV, whose wars have lead to poverty, hunger and rioting. King has faced numerous assassination attempts already despite his young age and thus he entrusts his safety to D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, all of them aging men already.Sounds exciting, right? Unfortunately, it is not. And I do not blame the actors for this. All of the main characters are played by talented actors, from Gabriel Byrne as D'Artagnan to Jeremy Irons as Aramis. They're just the right amount of over the top to fit the spirit of adventure, yet serious enough that they can sell the darker moments. Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio as King Louis is still in that younger phase of his career where you cannot take him that seriously, but he does a decent job here as well.No, it's the script that's at fault. Or perhaps the directing. The events themselves are exciting on paper, but most of the film fails to translate that excitement into actual events. Like a scene where Louis is hosting a grand ball while at the same time his opposers are working to kidnap him. Yet it drags. It's just dancing, Louis sitting on his throne, retiring for a moment, then coming back, sitting some more, people dancing. You don't feel the stakes at all. And the whole movie is like that. It should be thrilling, a great big adventure. But the pacing and the storytelling are both so incompetent that it doesn't feel like it.I'm also not a huge fan of the changes made to the novel, but they don't outright ruin the film. They also don't add all that much so I don't see the point of including them, but that's a nitpick.The film has its upsides. Visually it's very pleasing, all the musketeers are fun characters, if depicted a bit shallowly in the case of Porthos and Athos, the score is decent and even the story at least has elements of adventure in it. Personally I've seen much better adaptations, but if you're a fan of the actors, you might get something out of it.