Rent The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Wonderful big-screen cinema - The Count of Monte Cristo review by Alphaville

After the wonderful French remake of The Three Musketeers, this equally colourful old-school near-3hr adventure is the kind of epic they sadly no longer make in Hollywood. If you don’t know the story it must seem even better, although unforgivably they tell us the plot not only on the DVD sleeve but also over the DVD’s opening menu page. Even knowing the plot, this is a stirring adaptation, with less derring-do than the Musketeers but with equal grandeur, flair and visual spectacle. Good use of drone shots adds to the visual panache. The second-half plot becomes a tad unbelievable at times, but all comes together again for a rousing and touching last half-hour.

Big, Glossy, Sloshy, Swashbuckling, Bloated Melodrama - and None the Worse for that! - The Count of Monte Cristo review by PV

This is the movie and NOT the 8 part French TV series with Jeremy Irons also from 2024.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, which I could not stop watching although I'd only planned to watch half - so I stayed up 90 minutes past my planned bedtime to watch it. i was HOOKED. It is good old-fashioned story-telling, with love, passion, betrayal, war, violence, hate, revenge/vengeance, and a theme of justice throughout. I loved it!

Thankfully no colourblind casting which it WOULD have in Hollywood BUT this is the sort of great entertainment Tinsel Town USED to make, but no more. Ironic as Alexander Dumas did have an African slave grandmother and a nobleman French grandfather - their St Dominique(Haiti)-born son was a high-ranking French general, so his son Alexander Dumas was high-born and privileged indeed.

Dumas was highly prolific, almost a French Dickens, with serialised novels (as MonteCristo was in magazines first in 1844) BUT Charles Dickens wrote all his own work. Not so, Dumas. He has a factory system, a bit like novelist James Patterson now, with a team of writers in a production line and Dumas providing a plot which was then embellished and added to. Of course, Dumas did write a lot too. but...

The Count of Monet Cristo, like many of his novels, was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter, Auguste Maquet who did take Dumas to court in 1851 but lost.

A big budget is needed here and pays dividends. The character list and complex relationships DO require concentration, though on Wiki and online there's a handy character map for anyone who gets lost.

Yes, the plot is silly and unbelievable BUT it is fiction, not a documentary - and Dumas himself had to flee France after Napoleon III took over in 1851 so lived in Italy and Russia, so his life was an adventure! But where would Shakespeare be without the conceit of disguise? A bit James Bond at times and the Kingsman films BUT this is WAY more entertaining for me than either.

Some gripes: the phrase 'red in tooth and class' is used. It originates in English poet Tennyson's IN MEMORIAM (1850); this story is set from 1815 and 25 or so years ahead.

Secondly, Britain banned the slave trade and enforced the ban from 1807 at great cost to herself in all ways (one third of the British navy died doing it). So that does not fit UNLESS these are illegal slave ships mentioned. maybe to the birthplace of Dumas, modern-day Haiti. Not sure. Dumas is his slave mother's surname (and she was later sold on as alves with her two daughters, sisters of Alexander, before their father returned to France). The statue in France of Dumas's mixed-race father was melted down by the Nazis in 1941).

This is, in a word, GREAT entertainment - for the family too as no explicit sex or swearing - and was the 2nd highest grossing French film of 2024. I loved it. 4 stars because it sags a bit in the third act and one or two minor characters needed a more explicit backstory stated (BUT this film is GOOD at explaining often, as the inter-relationship multi-character landscape can confuse - a large cast here!)

4 stars. 4.5 even.