Everyman
The Count of Monte Cristo is a thrilling and absorbing adventure story: at three hours, it doesn't feel like a long film, and you get used to the subtitles after a few minutes. I don't know how it comes across to a Francophone, but I felt that the language and the subtitles had a helpful distancing effect on the melodramatic excesses. (If they'd been talking in English, they would either have been talking Modern or Old Fashioned and neither would have quite worked.)
But sacre bleu! I could hardly believe how derivative it was. It feels like a kind of French Eroille Guerres [un Novellle Espoir] -- a greatest hits reel in which all the screen-writers' favourite moments are spliced together into one mega movie.
The basic set-up -- that the hero, Edmund Dantes [Pierre Niney], saves a pretty lady's life and, as a result, is falsely accused of espionage -- reminds one of the opening to the Thirty Nine Steps. Imprisoned in an oubliette, our hero naturally encounters another prisoner with a long beard -- shades of Robin of Sherwood and indeed Black Adder. The Old Man [Pierfrancesco Favino] turns out to be the Last of the Jedi Knights -- or, in an obvious nod to Dan Brown, the Templars -- and over the course of a decade is able to make Edmund fluent in foreign languages, philosophy, and an infallible master of disguise. Taking Campbell's meeting-with-the-mentor a little bit too literally I should say, to say nothing of his descent-into-the-underworld. One also thinks of poor Westley being taken from his true love by pirates and coming back as a master swordsman. The quest for the Templar Treasure (rushed over quite quickly) is pure Indiana Jones, right down to the secret carvings and the flaming torch. Edmund uses his vast fortune to purchase Wayne Manor (complete with suits of armour and mechanical sliding panels) and sets about taking revenge on the three people who framed him -- his best friend, Fernand [Bastien Bouillon] a corrupt lawyer, De Villfort [Laurent Lafitte ], and Danglers, the ship's first mate he was promoted in favour of [Patrick Mille].
He's more Scarlet Pimpernel than Batman; but with his opulent, mask-filled bedchamber and network of agents, the closest analogy is actually the magazine version of the Shadow. (He undoubtedly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.) The obsession with revenge -- and the tendency to rehearse lines to himself -- is obviously a nod to Inigo Montaya: he even becomes a pirate when the bottom drops out of the revenge business. He says that he deliberately cultivates nightmares so that his hatred and desire for revenge remains fresh, which is pretty mauvais cul, actually. The idea of the slightly wild ex-convict who has been hideously wronged by society naturally calls to mind Les Miserables, and the penultimate pistol duel is a pretty obvious lift from Hamilton, although there is mercifully no singing.
The duel is very deftly handled: we see Edmund deliberately miss (did I mention that he was the greatest marksman in France?) but we are kept in suspense as to whether his opponent took the opportunity to kill him. And the film ends, as it pretty much was bound to, with a the clash of steel, but it largely eschews swash-buckling for a quite brutal fight. He pulls a dagger out of his own chest and holds it to Fernand's throat ("C'est juste une blessure corporelle"?) but in the end he allows him to live because dying would be too easy -- another clear borrowing from the Princess Bride.
His revenge plot is ludicrously complex: it requires the rest of the world to be predictably stupid, to fall in love with the right decoys at the right moments and never to see through any of his disguises. But we accept that his superpower is Being The Count (in the way that Batman's power is Being Batman) so the plan always comes together. In a lot of ways, Edmund is in the role of the supervillain more than the hero -- he is dark and smoulders and desperately hurts everyone around him -- but we still root for him because the original crime was so ghastly. The one time I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief was during the prison escape: I couldn't swallow the idea of him spending twelve years digging a tunnel, and communicating openly with Obi-Wan, without a single prison guard suspecting. But the actual escape is so outrageously exciting that I wouldn't dare question it.
Among the thrilling intrigue and preposterous plot twists there's some quite deep character development. The scenes where Edmund he is reunited with Mercedes [Anaïs Demoustier], his former fiance (who believes him dead) are very delicately acted indeed. The villains are a bit too villainous, but the subsidiary heroes are believable and nice and you want them to have a happy ending. Which only some of them do.
All told, a quite shamelessly romantic and melodramatic evening on the Everyman sofas. Someone should definitely turn it into a book.
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