Daily Times

The Three Musketeers has been adapted to the screen and this is no exaggeration, a lot. By this stage Alexandre Dumas’ novel must be languishing only slightly behind A Christmas Carol and the Bible in the most-adaptations race. The last Barbie movie before Greta Gerwig’s much-hyped odyssey saw the dolls donning cavalier caps and buckling swashes. There’s even a 2004 musical version starring Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

So, when The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan starts with our titular character literally pulling himself out of the grave following a carriage-rescue gone awry, it’s hard to imagine director Martin Bourboulon is unaware of this part of the book’s legacy.

This time around the tale is split neatly down the middle, with the second part filmed back-to-back with the first and debuting in France at the end of the year. The broad story feels pretty familiar, even if a few liberties have been taken to streamline the original text: D’Artagnan arrives in Paris, upsets a trio of musketeers, they have a fracas with Cardinal de Richelieu, they all become best buds.

But when Athos gets framed for murder and thrown in prison, the rest of our misleadingly-named quartet must navigate English noblemen, missing necklaces and a spot of musket fire to save the day.

So far, so conventional, and indeed we might have reached the point now where Dumas’ novel is almost immune to radical reinvention. But though Bourboulon’s film might not, to mix French period metaphors for a second, set the barricades alight, it does do everything you’d expect from a good old action-adventure movie very, very well.

Nothing says this quite so eloquently as the fight scenes. Just last year The Northman and Athena both demonstrated the thrill of a good fight through a single shot and D’Artagnan takes that baton and runs with it. Suitably chaotic, punchy and crucially, cool as hell, one forest-set ambush in particular is up there with one of the best action sequences of the year.

And what else do we really want from a Three Musketeers movie? That’s right, romance! Thankfully, D’Artagnan’s love interest Constance is on hand and between them the pair demonstrate a genuinely hilarious level of chemistry that lifts some of the otherwise slightly dry period-political intrigue that separates faceless soldiers taking rapiers to the chest. Eva Green, meanwhile, plays Milady with relish and though Eric Ruf’s Cardinal might not be quite as moustache-twirling as we’re used to, the rest of the cast work perfectly nicely. D’Artagnan is very much a part one, though, which does result in a bit of an abrupt ending that finds an awkward halfway house between wrapping up its own story while setting up the rest. Still, it’s hard not to find joy in a spot of good old-fashioned swashbuckling – and on that front, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan more than delivers.