The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan (2023)

Martin Bourboulon's The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan arrives with the confidence of a thirty-six million euro French production that has decided the 1844 Dumas novel needs a thriller's pulse. The duels are crisp, the mud is real, and the whole enterprise hums with the self-assurance of a franchise opener that knows a second part is already in the can. It is, by most measures, a good time at the cinema.

The cultural bookkeeping is more interesting than the swordplay. The production invents Hannibal, drawn from the real Aniaba, reputedly France's first black musketeer, and casts Lyna Khoudri as Constance, gestures that nudge a famously white historical cast toward something more contemporary. Porthos is bisexual now, a detail mentioned and then set aside. The filmmakers openly sought strong female characters and a certain modernity, and star François Civil had the seduction scenes rewritten so his D'Artagnan might flirt with more respect. These are real interventions. They are also decorative. The film never pauses to argue with us about any of them, which is a mercy.

What we do not get is a sermon. There is no climate reckoning in seventeenth-century France, no critique of the aristocracy's economics, no discourse on bodies or minds. Cardinal Richelieu remains a schemer, the king remains a nervous man in a large hat, and the camera cares only about who is holding the sword. As pieces of cultural signaling go, these are faint brushstrokes on a very large canvas. The result is a swashbuckler politely modernized at the edges and left alone at the center. Refreshing, in its way.