Tright here’s not quite a lot of roistering occurring within the cinema proper now, however right here’s a movie which amusingly roisters its coronary heart out. Regardless of some up to date touches – together with an LGBT character-shift and a modern-style assassination try – this new model in two elements of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 basic The Three Musketeers is a distinctly old style leisure, and leisure is rarely straightforward. A high-gloss French costume film, it is going to have devotees of the Netflix talent-agency sitcom Name My Agent! questioning which of that present’s characters are representing which star; it seems to separate its two feature-episodes in roughly the place that Richard Lester and screenwriter George Macdonald Fraser divided their Three and 4 Musketeers within the Seventies.
Right here is an element one, and François Civil stars as D’Artagnan, the Seventeenth-century hopeful who journeys up from the provinces to Paris, craving to be one of many elite King’s Musketeers. Our younger swordsman – solely that quaint Freudian time period will do – bromantically meets-cute with three grizzled veteran musketeers – Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmaï) and Aramis (Romain Duris) – having in his maladroit bumpkin method by chance jostled or insulted every of them. Their impetuous three-to-one duel is interrupted by the swaggering paramilitary corps loyal to sinister intriguer Cardinal of Richelieu (Eric Ruf), and our 4 amigos are united by their detestation of those creepy bullies.
Quickly D’Artagnan and the gang are drawn into Richelieu’s plan to entrap the queen (Vicky Krieps) right into a pretend treason plot together with her English admirer, the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), in order that Richelieu has a pretext to power the king (a glowering Louis Garrel) to assault French Protestants. This film additionally imagines a subplot to border Athos on a phoney homicide cost, and all of it hinges on the cardinal’s elegant hitwoman, Milady, by which position Eva Green does quite a lot of hilarious long-stemmed pipe smoking.
There’s some wonderful stunt work on present; it jogged my memory what a sucker I’m for somebody leaping on to a horse in a single leap and using away. There’s additionally an old-school tavern scene, though this movie, directed by Martin Bourboulon, steers it away from the trad hetero-sexist banter. That’s to be anticipated, though purists will remorse the shortage of farmyard animals within the struggle scenes: flapping, squawking geese and chickens scurrying out of the best way of the duellists. It is a lavishly produced, very fulfilling harmless pleasure.
