‘Three Musketeers’ should fall on sword

Whatever your relationship to the Alexander Dumas story about Athos, Porthos, Aramis and their lionhearted intern, D’Artagnan, there’s a word for the latest screen edition of “The Three Musketeers”: whatthehell?

Director Paul W.S. Anderson brings to this costume party the same battering-ram sensibility he brought to “Alien Versus Predator,” “Death Race” and the ongoing “Resident Evil” franchise.

The 1844 Dumas adventure classic is now a steampunked migraine. Clashing swords – 3-D swords in your face! – purloined jewels and court intrigues no longer suffice. This movie couldn’t give a rip about that stuff. It exists for its digital airborne sailing vessels and deadly retro-futuristic flamethrowers.

Somewhere in there you’ll find a trio of cynical, out-of-work musketeers, the casualties of “budget cuts,” as one of them notes early on.

They are homicide machines, or at least maiming machines, given to slow-motion gamer-style “kills.”

“I thought you’d all be a little more … heroic,” says D’Artagnan, played by a haircut in search of an actor in search of a performance named Logan Lerman.

Leonardo da Vinci, we learn, has drawn up plans for a deadly flying “war machine,” a combination of dirigible and seafaring galleon.

In the prologue, Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) sneak into Venice on a special-ops mission. Their accomplice, Milady de Winter, is played by Milla Jovovich, who is married to the director, which explains that.

Soon she betrays the lot, allying herself with Cardinal Richelieu on the one hand and the Duke of Buckingham on the other. Christoph Waltz snivels as Richelieu while Orlando Bloom swans around and consistently lets the energy dribble away from his dialogue scenes (not that director Anderson cares about dialogue).

Lerman already has done solid work in films such as “3:10 to Yuma” and the first “Percy Jackson” film, but he’s a blank slate here.

As Rochefort, a role beefed up for this latest film version, the splendid Mads Mikkelsen has a flash or two of menace, even if his English is less than fluid.

But the action is so dominated by green-screen effects and bombastic nonsense, you long for a decently paced, shrewdly edited sword fight or two.

Rewatch the 1974 Richard Lester “Three Musketeers” sometime. That impudent entertainment, both plush and merrily slapdash, had little to do with Dumas, but it had a spark to call its own.

This latest version is “le pits.”