The Musketeers are back: BRIAN VINER reviews The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

It’s been 50 years since kids of my generation fell in love with the story of the Three Musketeers.

We were seduced in part by Richard Lester’s impressively rigid 1973 swashbuckler, but possibly to a greater extent (at least in my own case) by the same year’s feature film Hanna-Barbera, which was inspired by the animated segment in Saturday Morning’s show The Banana Splits television and blissful memory.

Of those of us who have come to know D’Artagnan primarily as a lantern-jawed pen-and-ink character (or, for that matter, as a rambunctious, if rather jaded Michael York in Lester’s film), I’d think a fairly small percentage also read the original 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas.

I don’t, I confess. For me, as for most of us, the famous battle cry of the Musketeers “All for one and one for all” has always been uttered in English.

Those heroic cartoon men certainly never roared ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un!’ neither did York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay when they took on Charlton Heston’s Cardinal Richelieu and his heavyweights in the 1973 live-action version.

All this brings me to Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan, a rare and welcome interpretation of Dumas’s big-budget tale in his own language, which, like the film of 50 years ago, only contains the first half of the brings the novel to life. . The rest of the saga follows in The Three Musketeers: Milady, due out later this year.

It’s a bubbly 17th-century adventure that cuts and bumps, swings and kinks from start to finish, never taking itself too seriously, just like in Lester’s film.

That’s a good thing, because there’s plenty of melodramatic nonsense going on, never more so than when the handsome aspiring musketeer D’Artagnan (Francois Civil), shortly after arriving in Paris from faraway Gascony, in turn finds Athos (Vincent Cassel ), Porthos (Pio Marmai) antagonizes him. ) and Aramis (Romain Duris), who agree to fight each of them in a duel. . . on the same day . . . at the same place.

The French equivalent of Robin Hood wrestling with Little John when they first meet on the narrow bridge, it’s an invention that has always felt forced and still does.

Yet it hardly matters. With Eva Green perfectly cast as the beautiful and unreliable Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway in 1973), the beautiful Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri as the Queen’s secret messenger Constance Bonacieux (following in the footsteps of Raquel Welch), the breathless action and shadowy only ever leaving chicanes to give room for a romantic subplot.

The year is 1627 and King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) hopes to avoid civil war with the Protestants who plot to overthrow the monarchy from their stronghold in La Rochelle. He can’t trust his powerful adviser Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf), nor is he at all sure he can trust his queen, Anne of Austria (Vicky Krieps), who is rumored to enjoy an exceptionally cordial entente with a mischievous English aristocrat. the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd).

Louis is right to be concerned. Anne’s fabulous diamond necklace, his gift to her, seems to have disappeared. Rumor among his courtiers is that she gave it to Buckingham as a keepsake, and his courtiers are not wrong.

So D’Artagnan (partly out of duty, partly to woo the handsome Constance) and Athos (whose own neck has just been saved on a trumped-up murder charge) must get to England to retrieve the necklace in time for the Queen to can wear. it at the wedding of the king’s brother. Otherwise she will become French toast, even though she is Austrian.

Once they’ve crossed the Channel, Buckingham’s beautiful manor house conveniently looms barely 200 yards from the white cliffs of Dover, and more conveniently there’s a masquerade ball in progress. Not that much is hidden from the unscrupulous Milady who has also shown up to pinch off the chain.

The film’s best action sequence follows – a cliff-top horse chase that might even have Ross Poldark (of Sunday Night Television) huffing in its wake, like he’s on a Grand National no-hoper.

Martin Bourboulon directed the film with François Civil, Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris

Any swashbuckler worth his weight in plumed hats and flaming torches should look good. This movie certainly does; it’s slickly choreographed with fantastic handheld and drone camera work, making it an even more valuable addition to the many screen interpretations of Dumas’ story, dare I say, than the cartoon action in The Banana Splits show.

Best of all, there’s almost no use of special effects (except, I’m told, to get rid of the odd annoying parking meter in close-ups of Paris). Aside from those drone shots, it feels nice and old-fashioned; a movie, subtitled or not, in the escapist tradition of The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938) and Ivanhoe (1952) just when we need it most.