Back in April, Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was released in the UK with little fanfare and received far less attention than it deserved. A kinetic and gritty take on Dumas’ classic swashbuckler (and the first French adaptation in over 60 years), it brought a punchy, Bourne-like style to its frilly material, without sacrificing any of the wit and panache you’d expect from a Musketeers movie. It also featured the best hats witnessed on the big screen this year (take that, Oppenheimer) and, more significantly, ended on a tantalising cliffhanger.
As such, this blessedly quick-to-land second instalment (shot back-to-back with the first) picks immediately up from part one, launching us straight into a frantic prison-break sequence — complete with an obligatory but breathtaking moat-dive — and barely drops the pace for the next two hours.
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Despite the subtitle and the opening sequence’s promise of more Eva Green (spoiler alert: the slinky Milady survived her clifftop jump in the last film), the focus here is still very much on François Civil’s grimily handsome D’Artagnan, on a hot-headed quest to locate his missing girlfriend Constance (Lyna Khoudri). But Green is still given plenty to chew on, in a role she inhabits so effectively — toying with our sympathies in virtually every scene she appears — one might succumb to the cliché that she was born to play it. She also gets stuck far more into the action, whether going one-on-one with a slavering attack-dog or sword-fighting her way through a burning stable.
It's a shame that, once again, the smartly cast titular trio (Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris and Pio Marmaï) are largely sidelined into light-hearted B-plots, though Cassel’s Athos is given some devastating personal stakes on the main stage. However, the primary draw here is the action which, with Bourboulon’s practical, done-for-real approach, makes for some of the most thrilling on-screen blade-work we’ve seen in years. Almost as thrilling as those magnificent hats.