There have been some 20 versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, going back to 1908 and including Soviet and Egyptian takes on the famous tale. Alexandre Dumas’s story seems to have enduring life, as do his other classics — The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. Given how many remakes there have been of these three works, Dumas must be one of the most-filmed authors ever.
The latest rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo is that of American director Kevin Reynolds, who successfully added some modern action-movie sequences to the old yarn of Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves. His remake of Dumas’s revenge saga is presumably an attempt to recreate that feat.
In order to do this, Reynolds and scriptwriter Jay Wolpert simplify Dumas’s plot and pump up the action a little. The boiling down of the plot is inevitable, given that we’re dealing with one of those generously proportioned 19th-century novels, but its moral force is lost. What we’re left with by the end is a vapid reassertion of family values. If he was going to do that, Reynolds should have made sure he came up with the goods on the action front, but that aspect is unfortunately rather disappointing. Only the final duel has any real visceral power to it.
The narrative is set at the time of Napoleon’s exile to the Isle of Elba; he is of course planning a comeback, and into his plotting inadvertently falls Edmond Dantès (James Caviezel), a young sailor on the way up the maritime version of the corporate ladder — the mainmast rigging, perhaps? Dantès gets betrayed by his closest friend (Guy Pearce), loses the girl (Dagmara Dominczyk) and is sent to the hellish island prison of Château d’If. He spends a decade or so there, enduring annual floggings to comemorate his arrival and a severe lack of sanitary facilities.
He does, however, also meet a senior fellow prisoner (Richard Harris in fine fettle), who ultimately provides him with the means of escape — and the wherewithal to reinvent himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. Thus Dantès can return to the world to exact his revenge, sporting an anachronistically modern hairstyle and having acquired a tendency to wear Oriental dressing gowns to formal events.
In the novel, Dantès’s vengeance is meticulously planned: it is tailored for each of his betrayers. But he goes too far, and the resultant tragedy turns it all sour. In this movie, Dantès’s revenge is rather easily and quickly accomplished, and the sourness of his revenge doesn’t seem to linger very long, because the scriptwriter and the director make sure he learns his lesson in a few minutes flat. They also don’t want, it seems, to go so far as to show this putative hero poisoned from within by vengefulness, ruining his own chance at a new life because he’s obsessed with giving his enemies their comeuppance. In other words, this is the modern Hollywood colour-by-numbers version of the story.
That said, it moves along with reasonable self-assurance and entertainment value. Caviezel, who has a slightly brooding quality that works in the context, is not too bad, though able to telegraph the transformations in his character only in the most basic way. His facial hair or lack of it is required to indicate the various stages in Dantès’s development. Pearce, who should soon begin to rival the likes of Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in this department, makes a good, over-the-top villain, with a nice line in gaunt fury and barely suppressed bile. Both Caviezel and Pearce at least look good; this is a sharp war of the cheekbones.
Except for a couple of well-judged minor roles to add flavour (such Harris and Luis Guzman as Dantès’s pirate sidekick), no one has an awful lot to do apart from help join the dots of the plot or shade in their predetermined roles (dirty politician, dutiful son, and so on). The rest of the movie involves some pretty locations and the aforementioned action sequences. All this makes for couple of hours easily enough borne, though perhaps without the impingement of any real sense of excitement.