The Count of Monte Cristo: the latest adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel is a grand, robustly entertaining spectacle

As Hollywood studio execs continue to plunder the comic-book archives, over in France the stock of the 19th-century novelist Alexandre Dumas is back at a premium. Last year, a pair of rollicking Three Musketeers adaptations directed by Martin Bourboulon stormed the French box office (and grossed nearly £45 million internationally) on the strength of old-fashioned, expensive-looking swashbucklery – stressing the busy, cliffhanger-heavy populism of Dumas’s storytelling over any particularly literary credentials. Their success has paved the way for an umpteenth screen version of that other Dumas warhorse, The Count of Monte Cristo, once again scripted by the writing duo behind the Musketeers films, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière – who, whatever their other qualifications, have the advantage of sounding like actual Dumas protagonists.

This time, Delaporte and de La Patellière have also replaced Bourboulon in the directors’ chair – though you’d be hard-pressed to notice the difference. Money is thrown lavishly (if not especially characterfully) at the screen. Scenes roll by swiftly and broadly in a way the directors, like Bourboulon, honed on contemporary commercial comedies. These are not complaints. The Count of Monte Cristo plays, as Dumas likely always intended, as a grand, to-the-gallery entertainment, more hearty than soulful, with a barrelling narrative drive not suited to subtler artistry. In France, it’s been the kind of summer smash that lures even once-a-year cinemagoers to the big screen – a comforting reminder that the old ways are still good for a few years yet.

What it does have over the Musketeers films is a more imposing sense of scale: clocking in at 178 minutes, with drippingly excessive production design for even the most incidental of sequences, it feels like a pointed size-does-matter statement. Dumas’s 1,300-page doorstop doesn’t lend itself to restraint, of course, though the last major film version – Kevin Reynolds’ 2002 Jim Caviezel vehicle, attempted more of a condensation than this one does. Even as Delaporte and de La Patellière cull subplots and secondary characters – as well as much of the Napoleonic historical context that gave the novel some contemporary bristle – the film’s swell and swagger feel at least spiritually true to its source. (For those who prefer their adaptations even less abridged, an eight-episode, English-language Count of Monte Cristo miniseries directed by Bille August arrives later this year. Call it industry Dumania.) 

The most modern-feeling flourish here might be the casting of Pierre Niney (the wiry, angular star of Frantz, 2016, and Yves Saint Laurent, 2014) as its vengeful, oft-disguised hero Edmond Dantès. Not an actor previously inclined toward macho derring-do, Niney has a haunted, slightly fey chill that works rather well for a character whose elaborate project of retribution – against the three ambitious men who conspired to throw him in prison on false treason charges and stole his fiancée Mercedes (Anaïs Demoustier) – can tip over into perversely obsessive territory. 

As played by Niney, having much fun with a selection of wigs and prosthetics that barely conceal his distinctively hawkish, saturnine features, this Dantès is sympathetic but never fully readable. The two young, beautiful protégés (played by Julien de Saint Jean and Happening star Anamaria Vartolomei) whom he adopts to assist him in his mission – years after his intrepid escape from prison and retrieval of an eye-watering fortune – appear to regard him with equal parts sidekick loyalty and bemused distrust. It’s a welcome kink of unfamiliarity in otherwise well-travelled terrain. Certainly, the film’s antagonists hit more expected marks of snarling villainy: corrupt prosecutor Villefort is played by Laurent Lafitte (the rapist neighbour in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film Elle, and a go-to guy for oily disreputability), with a seedy Van Dyke beard that does half the acting for him.

Any viewers new to the story may fidget a little in an opening act heavy on set-up and seed-planting. Once Dantès’s daft, years-in-the-making prison break gets under way, however, it’s off to the races, as the film breathlessly fills its three hours with so much domino-stacked incident that we scarcely have a moment to think about it, much less poke holes in the lunacy of our hero’s grand plan. “Wait and hope” is how Dantès describes his modus operandi – this brash, robustly entertaining spectacle exercises no such patience. 

► The Count of Monte Cristo is in UK cinemas now.