Though remakes of The Three Musketeers abound and the concept has been subverted to fit any number of cartoons and cultures, it’s actually not the Alexandre Dumas novel that’s seen the most time on screen. It turns out that The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’s tale of revenge deferred, has seen so many iterations, it’s downright scary. True, it’s a noble sort of revenge, a man taking back the life wrongfully stolen from him for other men’s greed, but it’s still about a guy who spends over a decade rotting in prison with the singular desire to bring those men crashing down from the heights they’ve reached at his expense. In 2002, Director Kevin Reynolds retold the story with an aesthetic in the vein of classic adventure tales and great leading men in James Caviezel and Guy Pearce.
Edmond Dantes (Caviezel) and Fernand Mondego (Pearce) made for strange friends growing up in Marseilles, France, the former from a poor family of meager means and the latter raised in privilege and accustomed to the finer things in life. Yet somehow their friendship worked, even though Dantes couldn’t read or write and Mondego envied Dantes’s appreciation of the simpler things in life, and they made it into adulthood side by side. Their time together comes crashing to an end when, upon returning from a voyage that sidetracks them on Elba where the deposed Napoleon Bonaparte lives in isolation, Dantes is carted off to a political prison far away for a coming across a piece of sensitive information. Pronounced dead to his friends and loved ones, Dantes sits in isolated despair in the Chateau D’If until Abbe Faria (Richard Harris) tunnels into his cell. For Dantes’s help in the decade-long task of tunneling out of the prison, Faria offers to teach him all he knows which ranges from reading and writing to swordfighting and economics. Upon Dantes’s escape, he earns the loyalty of Jacopo (Luis Guzman), who becomes his right hand man for enacting an elaborate plan of revenge under the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo.
With Dantes a ghost of the past, Mondego continued his life in Marseilles, marrying Dantes’s fiancée Mercedes (Dagmara Dominczyk) and having a son. As the years went by, he squandered his inheritance and brought his business to the edge of bankruptcy with no one left in the city willing to back his enterprises. When the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo arrives on the scene after a heroic rescue, Mondego senses an opportunity and plans his final business bow, as the souls responsible for the disappearance of Edmond Dantes find themselves haunted by the demons of their past.
Dumas’s story is a well-crafted revenge tale and one that lets the audience take pleasure in the justified revenge of Dantes. So often films and television paint revenge as an unfulfilling endeavor that ultimately leaves its pursuers feeling empty or incomplete – but not here. The revenge is satisfying for the characters and the audience and the story moves along at a rather clipping pace, even when the protagonist languishes in his cell for the film’s first act. The film hinges almost entirely on Caviezel’s ability to endear himself as a strong character who never comes across as a victim but rather a man betrayed but unbroken. Just as we must detest the men who locked Dantes away, which Pearce and James Frain make quite easy as slimy self-serving aristocrats, we have to buy Caviezel as a man who has suffered and stewed in his own rage for decades. The cast was well chosen and the end result of the final product is a rather enjoyable adventure flick whose flaws are easy to forgive in the midst of its quick pace. (An interesting sidenote: Henry Cavill, who wears the cape as Superman in the upcoming Zack Snyder film Man of Steel, is the son of Mondego and Mercedes.)
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The disc is fairly loaded with extras, most or all of which have been ported from previous releases, but at least it’s something. The featurettes include look at the film’s swordfighting, production design, source material, writers, stunts, and soundscape. The disc is filled out with an audio commentary by Director Kevin Reynolds and a selection of deleted scenes (also with a commentary option).
"The Count of Monte Cristo" is on sale September 13, 2011 and is rated PG13. Adventure, Drama. Directed by Kevin Reynolds. Written by Jay Wolpert (screenplay), Alexandre Dumas (novel). Starring Guy Pearce, James Caviezel, James Frain, Luis Guzman, Richard Harris, Dagmara Dominczyk.
