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A movie based on Alexander Dumas' masterpiece, The Count of Monte Cristo
is the story of a naïve and low-born adventurer Edmund Dantes (James Caviezel) who is betrayed by his friend Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), a man of high birth and Dantes' secret rival for the affections of his fiancée Mercedes (Dagmara Dominczyk). Fueled by his burning desire to possess the exquisite Mercedes, Mondego engineers a foolproof scheme to get Dantes out of his way: he and the ambitious local magistrate Villefort (James Frain) frame up the illiterate Dantes and succeed in having him condemned to life imprisonment in Chateau D'If for treason. His days of solitary confinement get a groundbreaking moment (so to speak) when a fellow prisoner Abbe Faria (Richard Harris) emerges in his cell from a tunnel he has dug for five years to escape. Faria convinces Dantes to join his tunnel-digging venture in exchange for what looks like a crash course in the arts, letters and combat skills. Through a fateful combination of luck, hard work and opportunity, Dantes one day wakes up a free man, and returns to Marseilles with a loyal sidekick-for-life, Jacopo (Luis Guzman). Finding Mondego and Villefort now in positions of power, and his Mercedes married to Mondego, Dantes—now armed with enough wealth to bewitch Parisian high society—plots sweet revenge and reenters civilization as the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo. We won't rob you of the thrill of discovering the rest of this Dumas classic.
Respectable Hollywood critics have hailed, The Count…
as "the kind of adventure picture the studios churned out in the Golden Age." It has a great plot reflecting universal human emotions and acted out brilliantly by performers cut out for their roles. What makes "The Count…" twice as meritorious as any of the current crop of adventure films is its sheer reliance on a tight story and its artifice-free delivery. This should be a welcome change for moviegoers long buried beneath an avalanche of "adventure" films that lean heavily on digital technology for pyrotechnics. Those
Raiders and Mummy flicks, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings…
where would all those wizards be without the computer whiz? Move over, Batman, Superman, Spiderman—this no-nonsense 18th century Count can't fly, but he sure can escape from a rock prison without even uttering "Open Sesame!"
You get more than your money's worth watching this movie, because besides its technical
excellence, it offers a rich smorgasbord of issues for the whole family to feed on at the dinner table:
Is revenge ever justified? Is it man's fault if his misfortune kills his god? What is it about power that corrupts men? What is it about women that makes them believe in love? Is it all right to kill or be killed to save your honor? And lastly, that popular 20th century riddle, Why do bad things happen to good people? It's got enough puzzles that take a lifetime to solve—that's why we predict that the story, and the movie, will remain a classic.
(Date reviewed: April 5, 2002)
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