France, 17the century. While persecuting an escaped African slave, some men storm a convent, stab a nun and flee. After the nun dies, Eloise, the daughter of the famed Musketeer D'Artagnan, wovs to find the perpetrators. Eloise teams up with a clumsy poet, Quentin, and meets her aging father again, who reluctantly agrees to help her. They have a trace, a paper that she believes has a secret code. When Eloise is abducted and sold to slave trader Duke of Crassac, D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis and Quentin storm Crassac's ship and kill his men, freeing the slaves inside. They find out that Crassac is part of a conspiracy to kill the underage Louis XIV on the day of his coronation, which would enable Crassac to gain a monopoly on the lucrative coffee delivery chain. In a duel, D'Artagnan stabs Crassac, while Eloise and Quentin fall in love.
The art director Bertrand Tavernier made a peculiar and untypical excursion into the mainstream genre of the old "swashbuckling" movies with "D'Artagnan's Daughter" (somewhere also alternatively translated as "The Revenge of the Musketeers"), which takes a lot of time to get going and ignite, but once it does, it actually turns into a very amusing adventure film with a refreshingly feminine touch by presenting Sophie Marceau as the daughter of the famous Musketeer. The movie suffers from too much exposition, since the characters often go to great lengths to describe some situations and give context to the storyline, whereas several sequences are sometimes stiff, dry and overlong. However, once D'Artagnan and his friends enter the scene, the story ricochets into a more ironic-comedic direction, giving "D'Artgnan's Daughter" more freshness. For instance, Eloise takes her shirt off and is topless in front of Quentin who is asleep in his bed and unaware, so the next morning she teases him that he "missed" something last night, comparing it to "missing a comet".
The highlight is probably the sword fight sequence on the ship, where Aramis is able to beat every opponent with his sword, so one henchman decides to cheat by using a more "heavyweight" weapon, a giant axe, but then Aramis tops him by cheating as well—by simply drawing his gun and shooting the villain. Athos forgets which eye is supposed to be covered by his eyepatch, whereas Aramis complains that Quentin got valuable information through a confession of a dying villain ("Why couldn't you let me do the confession?" - "But he was dying!" - "He could have waited!"). The humor appears even in most unusual places (Louis XIV is in bed with his concubine, who is trying to persuade him to "elevate" her into royalty: "You always said I kiss like a Queen!"), whereas the finale also has several funny moments, such as when the bad guy Crassac is losing to Eloise in a sword fight, so he complains that "her sword is probably longer" than his. It is a pitty that somewhere in the middle of the film Eloise is kidnapped, and from there on D'Artagnan and his friends practically take over the entire second half of the film, as if Eloise "disappeared" from the story until the finale, making such an absence problematic and uneven, yet the movie has just enough wit and charm to hold up even today.
Grade:++
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