So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the idea. The story has legs.
Injustice, the upper orders out of control, a triumph against adversity, Alexandre Dumas’s original story has timeless drivers, plus a dramatic knot at its centre – whether to let revenge boil on or yield to something more gracious. As one tragic character on her death bed says to this story’s hero: “Between vengeance and life I chose life.” Which way is central figure Edmond going to jump?
This French version gives it to us straight. Young, brave, handsome Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney) is accused of being a Bonapartist and wrongfully imprisoned by a rival in love. While languishing in prison long enough for his beard to go grey, he befriends Faria (Pierfranceso Favino), the prisoner in the next cell, who tells him of a fabulous fortune hidden by the crusaders on the island of Monte Cristo.
Together Edmond and Faria contrive to escape, but Faria does not make it to the finish line, leaving Edmond alone to sail to Monte Cristo, find the money and re-invent himself as the Count of Monte-Cristo.
The story really starts here, with Edmond re-inserting himself into French society where, in disguise, he sets about putting a cunning plan into place which will exact hideous revenge on those who wronged him.
There are many bumps in the road but a key one is Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier), the woman Edmond loved all those years ago. She is now married to Fernand de Morcef (Bastien Bouillon), the man responsible for his incarceration. She recognises him instantly, though she does not tell anyone she knows it’s Edmond, not even Edmond himself.
Perhaps she will trip him up. Perhaps his comrades in revenge – André (Julien De Saint Jean), the bastard son of Fernand, and Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), who will be used as bait to hook Fernand’s legitimate son, Albert (Vassili Schneider) – will falter before the plan has been carried out. Perhaps Edmond will have a change of heart, though it must be said it doesn’t look like it. “This is not revenge. It’s justice,” Edmond tells Haydée at one point.
Edmond is about three quarters of the way to being a Batman figure – the tragic past, the vast fortune, special skills (he’s done a lot of training in jail), a sidekick, and he wears a mask. And this is in many respects a superhero movie, with Mercédès as Edmond’s kryptonite (to switch from one caped figure to another).
But of course it’s a period film as well. And everything is as it should be. The casting is superb, with handsome men, beautiful women, snarling villains, spectacular locations, sumptuous costumes and everything looking as gorgeous as it can, even when it’s probably not meant to (jail, for instance).
Best thing in it apart from Niney, who dominates in terms of screen time, is Demoustier. And the best scene is the one where Edmond and Mercédès discuss, in a Dangerous Liaisons style, their own shared history as if they were talking about other people. Beautifully written and played.
This is a good story, with love, money and revenge all cascading down the generations and ricocheting around families, and Edmond’s complex strategy to wreak havoc only revealing itself gradually.
Director/writers Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte also wrote the two recent The Three Musketeers movies, D’Artagnan and Milady, and The Count of Monte-Cristo can be seen as part of the same canon. Where next for these two? The Man in the Iron Mask, you’d have thought. But no. Instead it looks like they’re writing an Asterix movie: Asterix and the Kingdom of Nubia.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
