Already a subscriber?Why did I wait so long to read Alexandre Dumas? One of literature’s all-time best-sellers, he had to be doing something right. The grandson of a French nobleman and an African slave, Dumas was as unlikely as one of his own plots, and no less successful.
. For French audiences, this entailed a wait of eight months, during which their enthusiasm may have grown or dwindled. Palace Cinemas are removing the suspense by showing both movies as a double bill, which is self-evidently the best option, although many will have already seenBourboulon and his writers, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, have taken numerous liberties with Dumas’ plot, but preserved its breathless sense of adventure.
As is so often the case with an adaptation of a famous book, there are disjunctions in the narrative where the writers seem to assume our prior knowledge; in-house references that only Dumas fans will get, and new inventions that aim to bring the story up-to-date. The most gratuitous moment is the announcement that Porthos is bisexual, which would have been news to Dumas. This innovation adds nothing to the plot and seems to be merely a nod to our modish obsession with gender diversity.