Podcast: The Three Musketeers (2011)

Wirework lover and wife guy Paul W.S. Anderson tries his hand at an adventure classic with 2011's The Three Musketeers! How is he going to find a way to add Matrix fights, laser traps and exploding airships into this one? Starring Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, Mads Mikkelsen, Chrisoph Waltz, and, you guessed it, Milla Jovovich.

After a successful heist in Venice, the musketeers and Milady manage to steal Leonardo la Vinci's famous airship plans. Athos (Matthew Macfadyen) uses his classic scuba ninja skills, Aramis (Evans) his Assassin’s Creed cloak-wearing skills, and Porthos (Stevenson) his getting into prison on purpose skills. However, tragedy strikes when Milady, with the help of the Duke of Buckingham (Bloom) betrays the team and steals the plans for the duke.

One year later, D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is a Gascon bumpkin heading to the big city to start duels with everyone he meets. After picking a fight with Rochefort (Mikkelsen), the best swordsman in France, he picks fights with the 2nd-4th best swordsmen in France: the Three Musketeers. But they become friends anyway, and engage in a highly bastardized version of the book’s plot in order to thwart the evil plan of Cardinal Richelieu (Waltz).

Will the team accomplish whatever they were trying to do? Will they integrate a bunch of 2010s style 3D elements? Will an airship be shot at by an even bigger airship? You’ll just have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Inferno (2016)

Your Stupid Minds returns with loads of airport novel chills and spills in the third (and almost certainly final) entry in the Dan Brown Cinematic Universe (DBCU): 2016's Inferno.

Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) wakes up in a hospital in Florence with amnesia. He must, with the assistance of a suspiciously helpful British doctor Sienna (Felicity Jones), piece together the last few days and figure out why people are shooting at him. It turns out evil billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) has created a virus to wipe out half of the earth’s population. Surely bringing the planet to 1975 levels of people will solve all our woes and not just delay them for a few decades!

Langdon must run through a series of tourist attractions and frantic cuts to uncover the clues to the location of the virus. Zobrist, the nerd that he is, has hidden its location in a series of antiquities related to Dante's Inferno. Langdon uses his skills as a Harvard symbologist and middle aged museum-enjoyer to piece the puzzle together.

Expect a series of twists and turns that you'd need to have brain damage not to foresee! Luckily Langdon does have brain damage, which makes his cluelessness slightly more believable.

Podcast: 10,000 B.C. (2008)

Your Stupid Minds tackles manuks, saber-tooth tigers, and terror birds in our latest episode that covers Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, and Cliff Curtis! Featuring returning guest and Steven Strait expert Sarah Dobson Richard!

D’Leh (Strait) is a mammoth (manuk) hunter in the Ural Mountains who has determined he must kill a manuk all by his lonesome to marry Evolet (Belle). He does so, but not under the most ideal conditions, so he attains the White Spear and Evolet’s heart, but with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome.

Then some dudes on horses (with saddles and stirrups and metal weapons, somehow) steal half their tribe and D’Leh is determined to rescue them (mostly Evolet though). He and a few of his tribe mates traverse the smallest Sid Meier’s Civilization map available, from the snowy mountains, damp jungle, and desert, to a city of pyramids run by a creepy god emperor. Can D’Leh unite the slaves into revolt and save his tribe? Can we finish this movie before falling asleep? Did they go out of their way to make this historically inaccurate? Has there ever been a successful caveman movie? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Podcast: Assassin's Creed (2016)

It’s officially the Christmas season! Here we come a-wassailing! Here comes Santa Claus right down Santa Claus Lane! Jack Frost nipping at your nose. We’re reviewing Assassin’s Creed (2016).

Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is a convicted murderer who is being put to death in the Texas desert prison outpost in Huntsville. As he’s executed, he wakes up in a strange facility in Madrid. Sofia (Marion Cotillard) explains that they need to hook him up to a giant GLaDOS-like mechanical arm so he can tap into the genetic memory of his ancestors, steal the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code for free will, and this will somehow solve violence. Makes sense to me!

Cal is apparently a descendant of a line of assassins who have been fighting the Knights Templar for generations, mostly for this Apple but for other stuff too. He meets other assassin descendants, who basically have nothing else to do but hang around this facility for a while. There is also the icy Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), the Gendo of this organization and father of Sofia, as well as Cal’s father (Brendan Gleeson) who he thinks killed his mother.

Can Cal, under his cool ancestor assassin name of Aguilar, recover the Apple and save the world or something? Or is this creepy shadowy organization using sense memory VR to force you to do cool flips in 15th century Spain not all it’s cracked up to be? You’ll have to listen to find out! Also, if you didn’t know, this is based on a video game.

Podcast: Dracula Untold (2014)

Your Stupid Minds covers one of the many movies leaving HBO Max at the end of the month in the platform’s effort pre-merger to make their streaming service really bad! This one isn't a huge loss though. It’s 2014’s Dracula Untold!

Vlad Drăculea (Luke Evans) is Prince of Wallachia and Transylvania and mostly a good dad and leader, despite some light impaling he’s done in the past. Sultan Mehmed II is leader of the Ottoman Empire and eyeing his territory, and also wants to take his son Ingeras (Art Parkinson) as a Janissary, so Vlad meets up with a disgusting vampire he met in a cave (Charles Dance) and strikes a deal with him to borrow his vampire powers for three days so he can kill the entire Turkish army and turn back into a human so long as he doesn’t feed.

Vlad’s wife Mierna (Sarah Gadon) is a little peeved he didn’t talk to her first, but eventually is okay with it and he tears through the Turkish army with his bat powers. Can he resist temptation and return to human form, or will he become a vampire forever? Obviously the latter, since Dracula is, like, a thing. So no mystery there.

Podcast: A Kid in King Arthur's Court (1995)

Direct download.

This time, Your Stupid Minds reviews a forgettable 90s family movie that is available on Disney+, 1995’s A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. A kid travels back in time (or to an alternate universe where King Arthur actually existed) to 6th century England to show medieval people the wonders of Rollerblades and portable CD players.

Click to watch the trailer, since Disney has locked this shit down and you can't embed the trailer.

Calvin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) falls through a crack in the earth after sucking at a baseball game and finds himself in Camelot. He spends most of his time in this extremely strange situation trying to court King Arthur’s (Joss Ackland) daughter Princess Katey (Paloma Baeza). But also an evil Lord Belasco (Art Malik) has a nefarious plot to marry the king’s other daughter Sarah (Kate Winslet), even though she’s in love with the jousting instructor Master Kane (Daniel Craig). Calvin defeats the bad guy mostly though 90s catchphrases and gadgets.

Podcast: The King's Daughter (2022)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds accidentally reviews two Kaya Scodelario movies in a row by covering a film shot in 2014 and intended to release in 2015. Instead it was dumped unceremoniously into theaters in January of this year. It’s 2022’s The King’s Daughter! Directed by Sean McNamara (3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain).

Marie-Josephe (Scodelario) is an orphan brought to 18th century Versailles for unknown reasons. It turns out she’s, get this, the king’s daughter. Specifically, the daughter of King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnon). So she must navigate the court intrigue of the palace while she finds true love.

ALSO, the king wants to live forever, so he uses his quack court doctor Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) to concoct a plan wherein if he eats the heart of a mermaid during an eclipse, he will achieve immortality. So the king hires a Captain Yves (Benjamin Walker) to capture a mermaid (Bingbing Fan) to do the deed. Will he go through with it? Will he have a change of heart? Did anyone see this movie? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Some Notes:

• In the time between shooting and release, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker met, dated, got engaged, got married, and had two children.
• One of the main reasons it was on the shelf for so long was Bingbing Fan, who plays the mermaid, got into some tax issues with the Chinese government and is basically blacklisted. Since this film had a lot of Chinese funding, the presumption was they were waiting for the scandal to blow over so it could release in China. It never did, so it was dumped into theaters this year.
• Also this is technically an anniversary episode. The Your Stupid Minds podcast began just over ten years ago: May 2, 2012. 🥳

Podcast: The American Templars (2013)

Direct Download.

Near-fatal cat infections and paternity leave is over, so after a brief hiatus, we are back! Chris's recuperation involved a trip to scenic New England, where he saw an old building once owned by Benedict Arnold (great-grandfather of the guy you're thinking of). A Google Maps search revealed a strange museum dedicated to the building. Friend of the show Sarah Long (guest on American Strays,  .com for Murder) mentioned that the owner of the museum produced a movie! So we watched it!

Notent Notables:

• To the best of our knowledge, there isn't any method to impeach a witness's testimony by showing the witness is a homosexual. The cartoon villain Catholic bishop seems to disagree, literally using information learned in confessional to try to discredit a witness against him.
• Henry Sinclair was a Scottish guy born in 1345, an Earl and a vassal of the King of Norway. What this movie presupposes is: what if he's actually Jesus' secret great-grand-kid, *and* he took a boat to America in 1385 or so? And the prosecution of the Templars in 1307 was part of this cover-up of this guy being born thousands of miles away decades later. It's pretty obvious.
• The movie gets basic details of the history of American colonization wrong, and gives that dialogue to someone whose job is working for a historical society. 
• The handsomest man in the movie, hitman with a heart Salazar, seems to have a chance at "making it," as he was a major character in the video game prequel "Life is Strange: Before the Storm."
• If you are interested in this movie, it is available for rent on Amazon Prime.