![]() ![]() As soon as Harris goes sweetly into that dark night, however, charisma vortex Caviezel dons Old Scratch facial hair and does his best Chris Sarandon impression, sucking the life out of the rest of the movie. Richard Harris comes off best as Edmund's mentor/Don Diego, Pearce has a blast as a loathsomely fey scoundrel, and Wincott and JB Blanc as an insouciant pirate king (a character greatly expanded from the novel though still underused) have moments in smaller roles. The Count of Monte Cristo is just like the deli sandwich that bears its name: lots of ham, lots of cheese, and covered with a sickly sweet coating to disguise its excess and excrescence until just after (or during consumption of its second half). After all the smoke has cleared and blood's been spilt, Reynolds zeroes in hopefully on a ridiculous bit of prison graffiti indicating that God will avenge all wrongs-funny, here I was watching a meticulously premeditated period Death Wish that runs at least thirty minutes too long. Yet where the book at least has the albeit unintentional side effect of inspiring sympathy in its cast of predominantly decent baddies, the film is so skittish that it tries to convince that 140 minutes of ugly revenge fantasy aren't 140 minutes of ugly revenge fantasy. For the most part, the major changes between film and novel are welcome ones that update or eradicate the more peculiar cruelties and perversions of the Dumas work. Readers of the novel will be relieved to know that the Woody Allen/Soon-Yi indentured sex-slave subplot hasn't made it to the final draft of Jay Wolpert's screenplay, though the addition of a pugnacious Puerto Rican man Friday (Luis Guzmán) rings perilously close to unkind caricature. Because there would be no movie without it, and because the previews and a basic classical education give it away, I'll tell you that Edmund escapes prison to become the titular nobleman and that he has a reunion with his lady fair, and I'll also assure you that there are a handful of well-staged swordfights erratically sprinkled throughout to occasionally jolt the slumbering audience into brief attention. It appears as though boggle-eyed naïf Edmund was betrayed by his best friend Fernand (Guy Pearce), the chief magistrate Villefort (James Frain), and the orthodontically disabled Danglars (Albie Woodington)-and as he rots away ("rots" in the sense that he loses neither weight nor teeth), poet/priest cellmate Faria (Richard Harris) aids him in plotting sweet revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo is so uncertain that you can assimilate thorny characterizations and plotting that it provides for you a series of visual aids, lest you be put off by independent thought.Įdmund Dantes (Jim Caviezel) is an illiterate dullard who, after meeting Napoleon in a pleasantly overblown prologue, is arrested for treason in Marseilles and shipped off to Chateau D'if island prison, which is presided over by the wry warden Dorleac (a hilarious Michael Wincott). Accordingly, one can recognize the side a character's on by his oral health: thirteen years in an early nineteenth century French prison does nothing to despoil our hero's heavenly choppers, while those same thirteen years in comfort in Gay Paree wreak dental mayhem on our snarling villain. Had they followed the 1934 model and taken a simpler version from the many threads in the book it would have been much more effective.The Count of Monte Cristo is so worried about earning back its budget that it has erased all semblance of controversy and character ambiguity: the good guys are lily white and the bad guys are grotesquely stained. It would have made a great mini series, but there's simply too much going on to cover in two hours. The swashbuckling from the 1934 film is kept, the truncated revenge elements are rearranged and lack the depth to show that the men are undone by their own actions, and the bittersweet ending from the book retains only the bitter elements ![]() We're left with a quick parade of characters with little or no back story, often keeping only their name from the book and none of their character, who pop up with a few exposition laden lines. This TV film from 1975 takes more from the book, but simply had no time to fit it all in. What the 1934 film did was take the core of the revenge story from the many elements and threads in the book and add swashbuckling (there are no sword fights in the book), and changed the ending to keep the punters happy - brilliant. All film versions of the Count Of Monte Cristo are going to be compared to the classic Robert Donat version from 1934. ![]()
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