The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady (Bourboulon, 2024)

Part I of Martin Bourboulon’s newest iteration of The Three Musketeers made it onto my list of personal favorites from 2023. I was decidedly cooler towards Milady, so I’ve spent the better part of a week trying to decide whether:

a) I overvalued the first film; or,

b) The second film is inferior in some way to the first.

After due deliberation, I’ll take door number three.

I think the film really is fun, and I think Bourboulon’s visual style breathes energy into what could be a stiff genre. More importantly, it’s grounded in enough grit to avoid the camp feelings that might be connected by swordplay. But…

Perhaps the decision to break things up into multiple parts wasn’t the best fit for this material. Despite a three minute or so prologue recapping the first film, Milady often left me probing my memory trying to reminder details of a film I watched five months ago. Outside of the action scenes, which are swell, the film often left me unsure about what had already been shown/told to me and forgotten versus how much was clouded in mystery.

So, is that a recommendation? It depends. If you haven’t seen Part I or saw it months ago, I would not recommend a journey to the theater to see Milady. But, if you have an opportunity to stream them together or in closer proximity to one another, then you might have a more positive response. As I write this, the film has an 88% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with thirty-one positive reviews and four negative ones. I noticed, two-thirds of all of those ratings were in December, and half of the negative reviews were from critics who only posted their reviews this month. And two of the four negative reviews for Milady were from critics who posted positive responses to D’Artagnan. This certainly suggests to me that my experience was not unique, and while there is a broad consensus that the project is worth watching, I am not alone in thinking that either the first part is better or that the viewing experiences is not improved by breaking it up.

There is, of course, another “Part Two” playing at theaters right now, Dune. And I have been surprised at my own indifference to going to see it, despite enjoying Part I very much. Perhaps April is a different season, where moviegoers want different things. Perhaps films like Mission: Impossible suffer less from being broken up into parts because they are already plot-driven franchise instalmments that don’t require us to remember what happened in the last movie that we may have watched months or years ago. If I am 100% honest I had no recollection of who Esai Morales’s Gabriel was — whether he had actually been in one of the previous films or was just part of the mythology, like Blofeld in James Bond. It turned out I didn’t really need to know. He was the bad guy. The details of his badguyness were somewhat inconsequential.

Fair or not, the Three Musketeers simply don’t have the same amount of mythological weight as Katness Everdeen, Harry Potter, or Rocket Racoon. I liked that they were a mix of Protestants and Catholics working together in a land divided by religious sects, but could I tell you (without looking at my notes) whch Musketeer is Catholic? I could not.

The Three Musketeers, like The Count of Monte Cristo, is based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas. His books are long, and they are packed with description. Bourboulon is to be commended for trimming the material, but it might have been better situated as a streaming season. I am convinced that if it wasn’t going to be shorter, it might as well have been longer. Right now it is an uncomfortable middle state.