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The Count of Monte Cristo
Swashbuckling adventure?
(Don't count on it.)
Where have you gone Errol Flynn? or Cecil B. DeMille? or maybe Mel Brooks?
It would have seemed that the makers of The Count of Monte Cristo had a great recipe for a box office hit. Take an Alexandre Dumas classic adventure novel, add some of today's most notable actors, mix well with breathtaking locales, energetic swordplay, hidden identities, betrayal, revenge and the odd murder or two -- what else could an audience ask for?
Yet somehow director Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) manages to make it all seem rather hum drum. By the time our hero Edmond hits the prison cell door at Chateau d'If to serve a life term for a fabricated treason conviction, what should have been the height of despair is instead queasily familiar and predictable. Is it because Dumas's plot has been borrowed so many times over the last 150 years, or is it that Reynolds is just going through the motions?
Based on the Dumas book of the same name, The Count of Monte Cristo is the tale of Edmond Dantes, the second mate on a French trade ship, whose brief, chance encounter with the exiled Napoleon leads to false charges of Bonapartism and thereby to imprisonment.
Miraculously, Edmond escapes and returns with a magnificent fortune, which conveniently allows him to mingle among the wealthy aristocracy and seek his own justice. John Caviezel (Frequency, Thin Red Line) as Edmond is never quite convincing or powerful as a man transformed by betrayal and bent on revenge at all costs. His lack of intensity douses any spark of energy the film might have mustered.
Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential) struggles mightily to give more "umph" to the evil Mondego than this constraining script allowed, while Richard Harris makes the best of it as Edmond's prison confidante, Abbe Faria.
And, in a surreal choice of casting, Luis Guzmān (Traffic, Magnolia) almost knocks the film on its ear as Edmond's righthand man, Jacopo. At home in a modern-day drama, Guzman seems ill at ease here, what with the frilly collars and pantaloons. His demeanor and accent are out of whack with the 19th century setting. ("Suh, Ah gotchoo dat boat you wan-ned!")
The Count of Monte Cristo offers nothing new and doesn't do terribly well at recounting the old. (The Count of Monte Cristo, Touchstone Pictures Production, rated PG-13, opens 1/25/02)
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