‘The Three Musketeers’ and the Joy of Old-School Blockbusters

“The Three Musketeers” is to France what Mickey Mouse is to America — a cultural pressure with a lock on the nation’s creativeness. The Nineteenth-century cloak-and-dagger story, written by Alexandre Dumas, has lived numerous lives onstage and onscreen, with stars together with Charlie Sheen, Charlton Heston, Milla Jovovich and even Barbie resurrecting the basic story of the Kings guard. It’s as iconically French because the Eiffel Tower, but, till lately, it had been greater than 60 years because the final French film adaptation.

Enter “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” and “Milady,” a gritty two-film franchise by the director Martin Bourboulon that seeks to reclaim this legacy in a significant approach.

“Milady,” the second installment, was launched in European theaters earlier this month; “D’Artagnan” performed in Europe final spring and is at present out there in the US on demand.

Boasting a forged of French nationwide treasures (like Louis Garrel and Romain Duris) and stars with world attraction (like Vincent Cassel, Eva Inexperienced and Vicky Krieps), these twin French-language productions have been conceived as offensives towards the tyranny of Hollywood films that proceed to dominate the French field workplace. On the finish of 2022, not a single French-language manufacturing made it onto the checklist of the yr’s prime 10 highest-grossing movies, signaling a disaster for a rustic whose cinematic heritage is some extent of nationwide pleasure.

“In France, we’ve the expertise, tales, and technicians to make blockbusters that may compete towards American choices,” Bourboulon stated. “Large films shouldn’t be made solely by American studios, so we have been impressed to take them on.”

Shot back-to-back, the 2 movies have been accomplished on a finances of $78 million, financed by companions in France, Germany, Spain and Belgium. That quantity may appear low in comparison with that of this yr’s Hollywood heavy-hitters, like “Barbie” ($145 million) or “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” ($250 million). But, collectively, “D’Artagnan” and “Milady” characterize one of the costly French productions of all time. This large funding is an element of a bigger program from the French distributor Pathé to help tent-pole filmmaking outlined by native character and sources.

In early 2023, the studio launched “Asterix & Obelix: The Center Kingdom,” a comparably costly comedy that includes homegrown I.P. and a star-studded forged (together with Cassell and Marion Cotillard). That movie faltered on the box-office — and fared even worse with French critics. “The Three Musketeers,” nonetheless, has managed to attract respectable crowds in France and hold the reviewers sated, partially as a result of it resembles the form of action-adventure spectacle we don’t get a lot of these days.

Think about the primary three “Indiana Jones” films or “The Mummy,” starring Brendan Fraser. These are old school extravaganzas, crammed with hands-on stunt work and grounded in an actual sense of place relative to the bogus CGI backdrops of right this moment’s superhero films. Intermingling palace intrigue and dry humor with bracing swordplay and horseback races towards the clock, “The Three Musketeers” is moodier than these American swashbucklers, nevertheless it supplies the identical form of responsible pleasure that appears to have been phased out by multiversal journey.

Inexperienced, who performs the chameleonic femme fatale Milady, was delighted by the movies’ sensible results and on-location shoots. The actress isn’t any stranger to big-budget filmmaking, having starred in English-language blockbusters like “On line casino Royale.” “With the inexperienced display, it’s like theater. You need to make it up,” she stated in an interview. “Right here, there was no inexperienced display. The castles, the Normandy landscapes, the extras — we have been all there within the current, dwelling the motion from the within.”

There are not any screen-saver visuals in “The Three Musketeers,” nevertheless it additionally stands other than its counterparts in the US for its palpable human intrigue and heavy dose of eroticism. Illicit affairs, heated love triangles and murderous tensions between previous lovers propel the plot — and one of many three musketeers is casually revealed to be bisexual after an evening of drink and debauchery. Heroic values like honor tackle a a lot heavier significance when musketeers are laid low with the demons of genuinely darkish histories. The eldest, performed by Cassel, is framed by his enemies: After a murdered damsel is discovered bare in his mattress, he tearfully owns as much as his previous abuses towards girls in court docket.

It’s passionate, borderline racy stuff for characters that are likely to get the family-friendly therapy — and these films are higher for it. The narratives of each movies are roughly structured round d’Artagnan’s musketeer ascendance, the sinister machinations of Cardinal Richelieu, and, within the second movie, the mysteries behind Milady’s malice — however they’re additionally distinguished by a meandering high quality that permits the characters to make love, joke round and get drunk. It’s classic reupholstered with a sexier silhouette.

A few of Pathé’s future tent-pole initiatives, nonetheless, sound extra questionable. A lavish rendition of Dumas’s different hit novel “The Depend of Monte Cristo” is within the works; as is a two-part biopic about Charles de Gaulle, the French president. Although “The Three Musketeers” was introduced as a two-part movie, a cliffhanger on the finish of “Milady” teases a to-be-continued. Whether or not or not a 3rd film is on the desk, the collection’ characters will reside on in two TV spinoffs at present in improvement: one, centered on Milady; the opposite, on the primary Black musketeer, Hannibal (Ralph Amoussou), who seems briefly within the second movie. If these expansions aren’t precisely at a Marvel Cinematic Universe-level of sprawl, the thought of a French Historic Universe provokes an uneasy déjà vu.

As superhero fatigue begins to sink into Hollywood, “The Three Musketeers,” with its immersive settings and fight scenes, and its broad-minded strategy to story, reminds us that there’s one thing to be gained by going again to the fundamentals. Persona and (near) real-world thrills can do plenty of the heavy lifting.