This is a great idea for a movie, and I'm ashamed I didn't come up with it myself. Thank writer/director Randall Wallace. His idea is perhaps the best one I've seen or heard since somebody suggested giving Elizabeth Berkley an I.Q. test and tazering her for every point below 100, or bending Joe Eszterhas over a fence post and allowing bitter Hollywood screenwriters to sodomize him with rolled up copies of "Showgirls." Wallace has seen the path to my heart and it definitely involves putting an iron mask on Leonardo DiCaprio and tossing him in a cell where nobody will find him. Little twerp.

Unfortunately, Wallace also found a need to show DiCaprio's face, which makes the movie just about impossible to watch given all the cooing twelve-year-old girls in the theater. See "Man in the Iron Mask" in a small theater and the air may actually become toxically humid. Leonardo plays the man in the iron mask, as well as his evil twin, King Louis XIV. Louis isn't very nice. He attacks other countries, starves his own people, and steals the women of other men.

Fed up with Louis' crap are the three musketeers: Aramis (Jeremy Irons), Athos (John Malkovich), and Porthos (Gerard Depardieu), who are now so old that they discuss the condition of their prostates (oh sorry, that's "Twilight." My mistake). Anyway, they're old, but they're cunning, so they hatch a plot to replace Louis with his twin. In their way is D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne), who is strangely loyal to Louis because he wants to play hide the scepter with the Queen Mother (Anne Parillaud).

When one of the mortally wounded characters exclaims "This is the death I always wanted for myself," "Man in the Iron Mask" finally goes over an inevitable edge, succumbing to the romance novel antics most of its juvenile audience are playing out in their minds anyway.