DRAMA; 2hr 58min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: Pierre Niney, Anaïs Demoustier
Smoke and mirrors: Niney
For 22-year-old newly promoted ship’s captain Edmond Dantes (Niney), life in 1815 France is sweet: now he can afford to marry his fiancée, noble-born Mercédès (Demoustier)! Or at least he would have married her if he hadn’t been arrested at the altar, accused of being an agent of the exiled Emperor Napoleon, thanks, indirectly, to a woman (Adèle Simphai as Angèle) whom Edmond, ignoring orders, saved from drowning off the Corsican coast.
As godawful luck would have it, a letter from Napoleon that Angèle was carrying was seized and planted in Edmond’s Bible by the livid ex-captain of their ship (Patrick Mille as Danglars), thereby consigning the hero of the hour to a hellhole prison. Fourteen unspeakable years later, reduced to a hairy scarecrow but bristling with steely resolve, Edmond engineers a frankly incredible escape. Although malnourished and quite possibly borderline demented, he makes his resourceful way to the island of Monte Cristo, where he unearths a buried Knights Templar treasure that spells bottomless pockets for the rest of his life.
Renaming himself the Count of Monte Cristo, the wily jailbird gets to work on destroying Danglars and the two detestable accomplices who evilly contrived to bring him down. And while eating the rich is no piece of cake, the Count is a master of disguise with the patience of a fallen saint, the cunning of a psychopath and two teammates with an even bigger axe to grind than he has…
The pain of mistreatment and the power of revenge will never get old. Alexandre Dumas’s novel was written in 1844 but this lavish swashbuckler from writer-directors Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte is the latest of no less than a whopping 29 films that have been adapted from it. For those who don’t yet know the rip-roaring story, half the fun is anticipating how its resident villains will wash up. And for those who do, riding the wave is a guaranteed trip.
