En garde, Milady… the Musketeers are back in an old-fashioned romp, BRIAN VINER reviews The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (15, 121 mins)
Rating:
Verdict: A proper swashbuckler
Fifty years have passed since children of my generation fell in love with the story of The Three Musketeers.
We were seduced partly by Richard Lester’s impressively starry 1973 swashbuckler but to a possibly greater extent (at least in my own case) by the same year’s feature-length Hanna-Barbera cartoon, which was inspired by the animated segment on The Banana Splits show of Saturday morning telly and blessed memory.
Of those of us who came to know D’Artagnan principally as a lantern-jawed pen-and-ink character (or for that matter as a dashing if rather effete Michael York in Lester’s film) I should think that a pretty small percentage have also read Alexandre Dumas’ original 1844 novel.
I haven’t, I confess. For me, as for most of us, the musketeers’ famous rallying cry of ‘All for one and one for all’ has always been delivered in English.
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was released in the United Kingdom on 19 April 2023
Those heroic little cartoon men certainly never roared ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un!’ and nor did York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay when standing up to Charlton Heston’s Cardinal Richelieu and his heavies in the 1973 live-action version.
All of which brings me to Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan, a rare and welcome big-budget interpretation of Dumas’ story in his own language, which like the film 50 years ago brings to life only the first half of the novel. The rest of the saga will follow in The Three Musketeers: Milady, scheduled for release later this year.
Classic film on TV
Stand By Me (1986)
Rob Reiner’s sad, sweet film, based on a story by Stephen King, is truly one of the great coming-of-age pictures of the past 40 years.
C5, Saturday, 12.35pm
It’s a rip-roaring 17th-century adventure which cuts and thrusts, swashes and buckles, from beginning to end and, also in common with Lester’s movie, never takes itself too seriously.
That’s just as well because there is plenty of melodramatic nonsense afoot, never more than when handsome aspiring musketeer D’Artagnan (Francois Civil), shortly after arriving in Paris from distant Gascony, in turn antagonises Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Romain Duris), agreeing to fight each of them in a duel . . . on the same day . . . at the same place.
The French equivalent of Robin Hood grappling with Little John when they first meet on the narrow bridge, it’s a contrivance that has always felt forced and still does.
Yet it scarcely matters. With Eva Green perfectly cast as the beautiful and duplicitous Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway in 1973), ditto the pretty Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri as the Queen’s secret messenger Constance Bonacieux (stepping in Raquel Welch’s footsteps), the breathless action and shadowy chicanery only ever let up to give room to a romantic subplot.
The year is 1627 and King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) is hoping to avert civil war with the Protestants scheming to overthrow the monarchy from their stronghold in La Rochelle. He cannot trust his powerful adviser Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf), and nor is he at all sure he can trust his Queen, Anne of Austria (Vicky Krieps), who is rumoured to be enjoying an entente exceedingly cordiale with a dishy English aristocrat, the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd).
Louis is right to be worried. Anne’s fabulous diamond necklace, his gift to her, appears to have gone missing. The word among his courtiers is she’s given it to Buckingham as a keepsake, and his courtiers aren’t wrong.
So D’Artagnan (partly out of duty, partly to woo comely Constance) and Athos (whose own neck has just been saved following a trumped-up murder charge) must leg it to England to retrieve the necklace in time for the Queen to wear it at the King’s brother’s wedding. Otherwise, even though she’s Austrian, she’ll be French toast.
Once they’ve crossed the Channel, Buckingham’s magnificent mansion conveniently looms up barely 200 yards from the white cliffs of Dover, and even more conveniently there’s a masked ball going on. Not that there’s much disguising the unscrupulous Milady who has also turned up to pinch the necklace.
The film’s best action scene ensues — a clifftop horse chase that might have left even Ross Poldark (of Sunday night telly) puffing along in its wake, as if on a Grand National no-hoper.
Martin Bourboulon directed the film starring Francois Civil, Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris
Any swashbuckler worth its weight in plumed hats and flaming torches has to look good. This film certainly does; it’s slickly choreographed with superb hand-held and drone camerawork, making it an even worthier addition to the many screen interpretations of Dumas’ story, dare I say, than the cartoon action on The Banana Splits show.
Best of all, there is next to no use of special effects (except, I’m told, to get rid of the odd pesky parking meter in close-ups of Paris). Apart from those drone shots, it feels pleasingly old-fashioned; a film, subtitles or not, in the escapist tradition of The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938) and Ivanhoe (1952) just when we need it most.
Help – I think my girlfriend may be an international super-spy
Ghosted
Rating:
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted (15, 116 mins) is a film I feel like I’ve seen 50 times before: an all-action romcom about a couple who get it together before one realises that the other is, in fact, a super-spy.
Yet it won me over. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are winningly likeable as lead characters Cole (romantic Virginia farmer) and Sadie (crack CIA agent), and it’s smartly scripted (Deadpool’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick share the writing credits with Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers). Plus, a classy supporting cast includes Adrien Brody and Tim Blake Nelson.
Anyway, sexual sparks fly after the pair meet at a farmers’ market, but when she doesn’t return his text messages he decides to make a grand gesture, tracking her to London where, naturally, he ends up being kidnapped, whisked to the Khyber Pass and tortured, until she arrives to shoot all the baddies.
By the time it starts getting really silly —about 25 minutes in — you might feel invested enough in them both to keep watching. I did. (Streaming now, on AppleTV+)
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted (15, 116 mins) is a film I feel like I’ve seen 50 times before. Pictured: Adrien Brody, left, and Mike Moh in a scene
Missing
Rating:
I liked Missing (15, 111 mins, ★HHHI) even more. It’s the kind of twisty thriller that couldn’t have been made even ten years ago, in which an 18-year-old girl (Storm Reid) uses her teenage tech skills to find her mother (Nia Long), who seems to have disappeared while on holiday with her new fella in Colombia.
Missing is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a so-called ‘screenlife’ film, in which the narrative unfolds largely on the smartphone and laptop of the main character, via text-messaging, Instagram, Google, FaceTime, the full i-works. Writer-directors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson push a little at the boundaries of credibility, but it’s ingeniously done.
Evil Dead Rise
Rating:
Evil Dead Rise (18, 97 mins), the fifth instalment of the Evil Dead horror franchise, is also the most extravagantly gory; a violent stab, by Irish writer-director Lee Cronin, directly into the heart of the premise ‘less is more’.
It mostly takes place in a shabby Los Angeles apartment building, where the discovery of a creepy 100-year-old book of incantations wreaks mayhem and havoc, and not in a good way.
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