The 1989 movie Quentin Tarantino is too scared to watch: “I’ve always been afraid to see that”
Of all the people who’d say they’re too scared to watch a specific movie, you’d put Quentin Tarantino somewhere near the bottom of the list, since he seems to have seen almost everything.
There are certain films he’ll refuse to watch as a matter of principle, though, even if he’s missing out by intentionally avoiding Denis Villeneuve’s Dune saga and the most recent Toy Story sequels, with the filmmaker insistent that if they’ve already been done and done very well, there’s no point.
That’s an almost identical reason for why he can’t stomach the thought of watching a 1989 adventure flick, too. It’s not quite a like-for-like comparison, but the picture in question is the third instalment in a series, and since he loved the first two, why wouldn’t he feel the same way about the trilogy-capper?
That’s the point, really: since he adores 1973’s The Three Musketeers and the following year’s The Four Musketeers, and holds them up as the epitome of cinematic swashbuckling excellence, Tarantino is so terrified by the mere thought that 1989’s The Return of the Musketeers won’t be able to match its predecessors that he’s never seen it on purpose.
The triptych all feature the same recurring cast, with Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain as Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, as well as Michael York as d’Artagnan and Christopher Lee as the Comte de Rochefort, and they were all helmed by Richard Lester, working from a script by George MacDonald Fraser, so it’s not as if there isn’t a sense of continuity, either.
Despite that, Tarantino still can’t bring himself to do it. “I’ve always been afraid to see that movie,” he admitted. “That’s actually one of the only movies on planet Earth that I’m afraid to see, because I love the first two so much that it seems like a compromised vehicle for them to all get back together again, and I’m just afraid.”
In his defence, it is the weakest of the three, and The Return of the Musketeers‘ lasting legacy is that of tragedy, with Rory Kinnear, who played Planchet in all of them, being killed during a horse-riding scene gone wrong, leading to a six-year courtroom battle that ultimately saw his widow claiming £650,000 from Lester’s production company, Falconfilms.
On the other hand, if you loved The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, would you avoid The Return of the King, just in case it didn’t stack up? Would A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back put you off Return of the Jedi? Tarantino’s favourite movie is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, so by his logic, since he worshipped the first two entries in the Dollars trilogy, why did he bother with the third?
Sure, he explained that “the only reason that I’m afraid is because of the high esteem I hold the first two movies,” but for most people, if they loved two-thirds of a trilogy, they’re at least going to give the third a shot, whether it holds a candle or not.
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