The Orlando Bloom Swashbuckling Adventure On Streaming Where He’s Actually An Excellent Villain
Orlando Bloom has played a lot of swashbuckling characters over the year, but it’s not often that he gets cast in the villain role. It turns out that Hollywood should think about using Bloom as the villain more often because he’s actually pretty good at it. If you want proof of this, look no further than 2011’s The Three Musketeers, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Orlando Bloom starred in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as a heroic swashbuckler, but he made an equally fantastic villain in The Three Musketeers.
Orlando Bloom plays the villainous Duke of Buckingham in The Three Musketeers, which is loosely based on the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novel of the same name. The film isn’t necessarily the best Hollywood adaptation of the story, but it does take an interesting approach to the tale and put it in an interesting steampunk-like setting. In fact, the film was critically panned upon its release, but the performances of the main cast are fairly strong and help to make it worth checking out if you want a breezy action flick to sit back and enjoy.
Along with Orland Bloom, The Three Musketeers includes a fairly stacked cast with Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, and the late Ray Stevenson as the titular swordsman alongside Logan Lerman’s aspiring musketeer D’Artagnan. The ensemble cast is rounded out by Milla Jovovich, Mads Mikkelsen, Gabriella Wilde, James Corden, Juno Temple, Freddie Fox, Til Schweiger, Christoph Waltz, Carsten Norgaard, Nina Eichinger, Christian Oliver, and Iain McKee. Paul W.S. Anderson, who usually sticks to video game adaptations rather than literary adaptations, directs.
The Three Musketeers wasn’t a hit, but it let Orlando Bloom loose as a scene-stealing villain in a delirious steampunk France.
As mentioned, the best part of this film is definitely some of the performances, namely Matthew MacFadyen, Mads Mikkelson, and Orlando Bloom’s performances. People have criticized The Three Musketeers for its writing and direction, but these performances are generally considered worth the price of admission (or the time sink in the streaming era.) As long as you’re not expecting a film that will wow and amaze you, there’s no reason you wouldn’t be able to enjoy this one.
Despite the strong cast and big names like Orlando Bloom, The Three Musketeers didn’t make a massive splash at the box office either. Still, the film brought in $132 million against a production budget of $75 million, so it wasn’t a flop by any means. Still, it paled in comparison to the hauls of the swashbuckling roles that Bloom played before.
Orlando Bloom was in between his latest appearance as Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and his next appearance as Legolas in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug when he appeared in The Three Musketeers in 2011. It was definitely an interesting choice to cast Bloom as the villain in the film when he was best known at the time for two very heroic roles. Still, it was a gamble that paid off in service of the film, despite the overall product not being a very good one.
Orlando Bloom undoubtedly had a massive hot streak of blockbuster, high-quality films in the early 2000s before his appearance in The Three Musketeers. Fans will forever belove his appearance as Legolas in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his subsequent appearances as Will Turner in several Pirates of the Caribbean movies were high watermarks for his career. Unfortunately, those characters would eventually have diminishing returns (at least from a quality perspective).
While Orlando Bloom continued to bring solid performances to the table as Legolas and Will Turner, the films in the franchises progressively got worse. While The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a masterpiece, the Hobbit films were a mess, and Legolas wasn’t even part of the books, making his appearance more confusing. The Pirates movies would also begin to diminish in quality, though there’s hope the franchise can achieve a return to form in the future.
Orlando Bloom will next star in Gran Turismo as Danny Moore, a character based on the GT Academy founder, Darren Cox.
In the meantime, Orlando Bloom is going from the literary world of The Three Musketeers to the video game/real-life story hybrid of Gran Turismo. Orlando Bloom will be co-starring alongside Archie Madekwe and David Harbour in the true story about a Gran Turismo gamer who uses his skills to compete in the world of motorsports. That film comes out on August 25, but until then, you can go stream The Three Musketeers on Amazon Prime Video.
