Film Review: The Three Musketeers: Milady

There have been countless adaptations of The Three Musketeers over the years, and after Part I: D’Artagnan arrived earlier this year it looked like Martin Bourboulon’s new, French-language, big-budget version had a shot at being a pretty definitive one. Part II: Milady is now finally here, but does it live up to the promise of the first instalment?

We pick up, after a surprisingly lengthy “previously on” sequence, immediately where the first movie left off, with D’Artagnan’s lady love Constance Bonacieux kidnapped and him abducted while trying to free her. In short order, he finds that he needs to team up with Eva Green’s diabolical Milady de Winter in order to escape, and soon finds his mission to rescue Constance tied up with the looming civil war between Protestants and Catholics.

The short version of this review is: if you liked the first one you’ll like this because it’s basically more of the same. And that’s no bad thing! Everything that made Part I stand out is on full display here since this really is Part II and not even attempting to stand on its own; it’s more like the second half of one very long movie.

The lovely, long-take action scenes are back, with particular highlights being a nerve-racking night-time raid on La Rochelle and a climactic duel in a burning building. The production design remains impeccable, with costumes, sets and locations uniformly gorgeous even if the increase in scale for this instalment does ever so slightly show up the limitations of the budget (the two parts combined cost $78 million, huge for France but peanuts in Hollywood). And crucially it retains the brisk pacing and general tone of a thriller, managing to feel simultaneously classic and modern and keeping the runtime under two hours.

Eva Green really gets a chance to shine here, as Milady’s self-serving nature, duplicity and skill at manipulation really come to the fore. It feels like a character she’s been building up to her whole career, as perfect a femme fatale as you could ask for, but she gets to show vulnerability and fear as well: she isn’t simply an evil mastermind. There’s a late scene where she pulls out all the stops to try and talk someone (whose identity shall remain secret due to spoilers) round to her side, and even after seeing everything Milady’s done across both movies it’s hard not to feel sympathy for her.

Talking of the female characters, Constance remains – despite the film beginning with her being abducted – one of the best changes from the novel despite her reduced screen-time in Part II. She’s extremely passive in the original, constantly being acted upon and rarely doing anything under her own initiative, and they clearly put in a lot of work to make her a more active participant in the story for the film.

Some of the other changes from the novel aren’t so successful. There’s a comic subplot involving Aramis’ sister that wouldn’t feel at all out of place in a serialised adventure novel, but here doesn’t really amount to much other than giving Porthos a reason to be in the movie; he has even less to do than he did the first time around. And the ending is at once very bold and potentially more than a little misguided, a quite radical departure from the book that, sadly, it’s impossible to talk about more without completely giving it away.

But these really are just minor niggles. If you thought D’Artagnan was a breath of fresh air, an old-fashioned romantic swashbuckling costume epic of the kind they just don’t make any more, then you’ll almost certainly love Milady as well. These are the best films of their kind since The Curse of the Black Pearl, and arguably even since The Mask of Zorro. If you like sword fights, stunt work and tales of heroic derring-do, you’ll be right at home here.