Swordplay Against Stunt Work

Historical European fencing, as practiced in the seventeenth century, is not primarily dramatic. It is a system for killing an opponent efficiently: structured footwork, tight measure, controlled blade engagement. The rapier, the dominant weapon of the era the film depicts, demands a relatively narrow, upright stance with the sword arm extended. Engagements are short. The decisive exchange often lasts seconds. Watching two skilled historical fencers work is absorbing if you know what to look for, but it does not read well in a wide shot, and it offers very little of what a camera hungers for — sustained motion, dramatic silhouette, spatial variety.

Stunt choreography approaches the same swords from a completely different direction. Here, the primary material is movement: what the two bodies do in relation to each other, to the space, to the architecture around them. Technique matters insofar as the performers must not injure each other and must hit their marks, but the governing logic is visual and rhythmic, not martial. A high parry that would leave a historical fencer open for half a second is perfectly acceptable if it reads beautifully in frame.

Peter Hyams, who directed The Musketeer and also operated camera himself throughout, was shooting for the second register. His background is in thriller cinematography, and the fights in this film are conceived as images first. That means the choreography Xin Xin Xiong designed had to be legible in the kind of tight, dynamic framing Hyams preferred — a very different brief from "what would a seventeenth-century swordsman actually do."

The specific tradition Xin Xin Xiong brought to the film is wuxia-influenced action choreography: a vocabulary that emphasizes continuous motion, environment as obstacle and tool, and the kind of vertical thinking — up onto tables, over beams, against walls — that European sword-cinema had historically avoided. This grammar carries with it certain assumptions. Weapons become extensions of acrobatic bodies. Space is exploited fully: floor, wall, ceiling, hanging object. Sequences are composed in beats, with deliberate pauses and accelerations, rather than in the continuous, unbroken pressure of a real engagement.

Applied to a Dumas story, this creates a recognisable hybrid. The ladder fight, the film's set-piece showpiece, uses a construction site as its arena — not because historical musketeers were likely to duel on scaling ladders, but because the environment permits a vertical sequence in which the choreography can breathe and develop across multiple planes. That decision is pure Hong Kong action logic. The swords themselves, in that sequence, are almost secondary to the bodies and the architecture.

Justin Chambers, cast as D'Artagnan, came to the role without deep fencing training and prepared specifically for the choreography Xiong designed — a significant distinction. He learned to perform these sequences convincingly as a physical actor, not to fence. The results show in the best moments: his movement reads as instinctive and propulsive rather than studied.

What Hyams and Xiong achieve, at their best, is a kind of physical plausibility that pure Hong Kong wire spectacle would lose in this setting. The film does not ask its performers to fly. It keeps its wire work subtle enough that the geography remains comprehensible. The fights feel located in the real world even when the choreography has clearly departed from anything a seventeenth-century swordsman would recognise.

Where the hybrid strains is in the connective tissue — the quieter exchanges that bracket the set pieces. When the film must deliver ordinary sword engagement without a spectacular environment to motivate the choreography, the gap between fencing and movement design becomes visible. The performers look like they are performing sequences rather than fighting, which is, in the end, exactly what they are doing. That is not a failure unique to this film; it is the honest cost of choosing spectacle as the primary value. In The Musketeer, that choice is made consciously, and the best sequences justify it entirely.