It’s amazing how many Count of Monte Cristo adaptations there are. Movies. TV miniseries. Even the Wachowskis and Guy Fawkes. Someone always finds something new in the wonderful malleable tale of Edmond Dantes. 2025 (2024 in France) gets us back to the French roots of the story, making an old school storytelling epic for the ages. This movie is so good I’m probably gonna get a Monte Cristo sandwich at a diner to celebrate the achievement Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere have pulled off here.
If you’re a child or the book somehow evaded you, Edmond Dantes (Pierre Niney) is a sailor in the 1800s France, and saves a woman (Adele Simphal), who shipwrecks, ignoring Captain Danglars (Patrick Mille) orders. Dantes gets promoted to Captain for his bravery, and Danglars is fired, but teams up with local prosecutor Gérard de Villefort (Laurent Lafitte) and Fernand de Morcerf (Bastien Bouillon) to frame and imprison Dantes, on the day of his wedding to the love of his life Mercedes (Anais Demoustier). Throw in a prison escape here, a few masks there, with assists from an oprhans Andre (Julien de Saint Jean) and Haydee (Anamaria Vartolomei), and you have the recipe for one of the tales of the ages, showing again why it stands the test of time.
There’s simply too many characters in the original Alexandre Dumas novel to turn into a reasonably long movie (if you want comprehensive Dumas, watch the 1998 Gerard Depardieu miniseries). As such, you have to make cuts somewhere. A simpler filmmaker would have cut earlier parts of Dantes’s story: his prison escape, his search for treasure, his return to his father’s house, etc, focusing on the juicy revenge tale. Filmmakers Delapore and de La Patelliere elect to keep it all, meaning they have to character cut. MUCH tricker of a task, since the plot mechanics require many of these people to intertwine. Creatively and thematically, these guys thought this out: the revenge tale is more streamlined and intricate: we have mono e mono revenge tales, and interfamily conflicts that make the story easy enough to follow and more emotionally satisfying. And because of their smart layout, we retain the epic scope of the story, opening with an incredible shipwreck, with added in fight sequences to an already thrill laden story of prison escapes and political machinations. The movie might sag for a few minutes, but This Count of Monte Cristo always finds ways to pick itself back up immediately, captivating the audience with its big, daring, rewarding filmmaking.
That’s because the themes are as rich and deep as they were when Dumas wrote the novel in 1844. Revenge and justice obviously come to the fore first. The line between them is VERY tricky: one misstep and you lose your moral clarity and become the very thing you swore you’d hated. This Monte Cristo goes even deeper with this, hitting us right in the heart with Haydee and Andre’s diverging tales that Dantes is driving. Andre’s life has been wholly defined by revenge and revenge alone, cast off and forgotten by everyone except Dantes, who uses Andre’s hate for his real father to become the whole of Andre’s drive to live. Dantes thinks they are aligned, but he and Andre are driven by different emotions, emotions Dantes failed to teach and explain to the impressionable young Andre. Haydee is on a similar track to Andre, but her seduction of Fernand’s son Albert (Vassili Schneider) shows her what true affection can produce. Bringing us to another big theme of this adaptation: generational lessons. This Edmond Dantes is a father figure to Andre and Haydee, whom are doing a lot of courtship of children of Dantes’s enemies. Do the children have to pay for the sins of their fathers and mothers? Is history doomed to repeat itself like probably with Andre and his biological father, or can Haydee, Albert and the other kids break the cycle? If the sin is something like greed, power, or anger, then we’re probably in trouble, but if the “sin” is love? More complicated, and further complicated so by the big end quote: wait, and hope. Despite the dark events that take place here, The Count of Monte Cristo in its heart is optimistic. The question is: how long will we have to wait? Time has this ability to change a person, both good and bad. For many years was zero possibility Edmond and Mercedes would have been together, as they were driven by polar opposite feelings, but time slowly heals Edmond’s heart and opens Mercedes back up again, making the impossible possible again. I could keep going to; such is the power the 2024 Monte Cristo adaptation maintains from its almost 200 year history of storytelling excellence.
So do you like rich stories with richer themes? Book adaptations? Incredible filming locations inside and out? Revenge tales? Prison escapes? Pretty people? European rivalries? Treasure hunting? Sword fights? Ocean adventures? There’s a little something for pretty much everyone in this Count of Monte Cristo. Get over the runtime, because you’re going to be glued to your seat from minute one, never letting go, waiting, hoping, and being rewarded for the time everyone put in to make as big an entertainment putting even bigger smiles on everyone’s faces as they leave the theater.