Director: Kevin Reynolds
Starring: James Caviezel,Guy Pierce,Dagmara Dominczyk
About five months ago, I saw a liberal adaptation of Alexandre Dumas (yeah, get your jokes out of the way) novel. The Musketeer was by far the worst piece of dung ever. So I was a bit hesitant to see The Count of Monte Cristo, especially since the trailer showed lots of swordfighting, like in The Musketeer. Also, how can you make a two hour movie from a book that is like one thousand pages long? For the record, I’ve not read the book. I think the Cliffs Note alone is 300 pages.
Also, I was a bit leery of Kevin Reynolds since he’s responsible for such gems as the Waterworld and Rapa Nui. If you said “huh?” to the latter movie, you aren’t alone. It made a whopping $300,000 at the box office. Oh wait, he directed 187 which made a whopping $5.7 million. And we all know about Waterworld.
Mr. Pre-Monte Cristo (James Caviezel) has a hot fiancé, Mercedes (played by the hot Dominczyk). Of course, Fernand Mondego (Guy Pierce) is pissed. Mondego schemes with Luigi Vampa to frame Mr. Pre-Monte to prison in some remote island off the coast of France. Unlike Napoleon who stays in a resort like Elba, Pre-Monte is stuck in the French version of the Alcatraz.
Inside the prison, the occasional boredom is broken up by the yearly whipping to celebrate the anniversary of his incarceration. During his stay, he befriends an old man who teaches him how to read and to swordfight. Yeah, despite being taught by an old fogey, Monte becomes the best swordsman in all of France. Monte escapes prison and manages to find the treasure of Monte Cristo.
Now that he’s the richest man on earth, he decides to exact revenge. I, personally, would have retired in Florida and partied with hookers, but that’s just me. He finds that his fiancé wed his enemy, his father killed himself, and, worst of all, someone’s been stealing his Sports Illustrated issues. So he’s noticeably pissed and the rest of the movie is about him getting into swordfights with hilarious results.
For a two hour Kevin Reynolds movie, The Count of Monte Cristo was pretty good. I have never seen this story in its various previous movie versions, most of them being over 4 hours long. And we all know that I don’t read. Aside from Guy Pierce, there’s no actor that one would recognize. Despite that, I found the chick incredibly hot which always passes the time.
