A Throwback to the Golden Age
Monte Cristo has both, and flaunts them wildly, but sidesteps the indulgence and aimlessness that has marked Reynolds' previous work. The film is an epic squeezed into two hours, an unchallenging but nevertheless thrilling throwback to the Golden Age, not necessarily of Hollywood, but of storytelling, where adventure, unbelievable as it may be, still manages to captivate and astound.

Edmond Dantes (Jim Caviezel) is a hero by default, and by means certainly less than noble. He is a hero dictated by his own need for revenge, transformed by betrayal from a passive, innocent man into someone almost robotic in his quest for vengeance. Betrayed by his best friend Fernand (Guy Pearce), who envies Edmond's strength of character, his noble spirit (despite being a commoner), and his beautiful fiancee, Mercedes, Edmond finds himself caught in the tumultuous center of Napoleonic French politics, an unforgiving place where betrayal and bribery are as common as murder. A set-up is masterminded by Fernand, Edmond is sent to the island prison Chateau d'If for phony charges of treason, and Fernand begins to appropriate his old friend's life. Mercedes is then given the false information that Edmond was executed for his crimes.

But Edmond is very much alive, and, after four years, has the fortuitous pleasure of meeting Abbe Faria (Richard Harris), an old priest who, for five years, has been digging what he thought was a tunnel toward the sea. Ends up he was digging the wrong way, and instead winds up tunneling into Edmond's cell, discovering a companion. Edmond, in turn, finds a teacher. The priest teaches him mathematics, economics, physics, sword-fighting. And he also has — as do most incarcerated old priests in stories such as this — a map that will lead Edmond to the largest sunken treasure the world has ever known.

So Edmond escapes, finds the treasure, and resurrects himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, well-read and filled, after 13 years in prison, with a lust for revenge so metallic and deep that his entire new life is centered on exacting this vengeance. That's one thing he didn't take from the priest — his teacher had warned him of the emptiness and godlessness of revenge. But the passive acceptance of fate does not a swashbuckling epic make, so Edmond continues on with his planning, preparing himself for that last act where he gets to watch all of his puzzle pieces fall into place.

You get lost in Monte Cristo: in the constant changing of fates, the sword fights, shady dealings, plot twists and turns. But the strength and fierce motivation of the film's wronged main character (as well as his and Pearce's convincing performances) guides you to the film's obvious ending. The film is rather flawless in its structure, characterizations, and pacing — it knows its course, and follows it precisely. [Spoiler warning] The ending is a bit pat — Reynolds mentions in the commentary that he wanted Edmond's character to suffer something for taking God's work into his own hands, for not heeding the word of the priest. But audiences, he worried, wouldn't accept the death of Mercedes at the end of the film, and so he tacked on a lame concluding scene which featured Edmond's new, happy family, together and smiling, on the cliffs of the Chateau d'If. Edmond acknowledges, a bit too late, the pointlessness of revenge. It's a pretty big contradiction in theme, but after the climactic sword-fight scene, it's easy to just let it slide.

A Put-Together DVD
Touchstone's DVD is, like the film, well put-together and streamlined, but lacking the epic scope (which is fine — too many extra features have a way of killing a film like this). The five featurettes are short and enjoyable. The first, a crash-course intro to the work of Monte Cristo scribe Alexander Dumas basically paints the prolific author as something of a hack, who was in the writing biz as much for the money and fame as for the love of the written word. That leads nicely into a segment with screenwriter Jay Wolpert, who appears to share Dumas' philosophies. His explanations for altering important parts of the novel are ballsy and entertaining to watch: This is clearly a guy for whom art and commerce aren't distinctly separate, which certainly serves the purpose on a film such as Monte Cristo.

The neatest trick on the disc is an option which lets you view a scene with four different audio tracks — a dialogue track, a music track, an effects track, and the final composite track. This feature is further evidence that foley artists (those who add sound effects to scenes after the fact), are truly important to the end result of a film. Four dull deleted scenes are presented with introductions from Reynolds and his editor, and Reynolds also provides a feature-length commentary, which he uses, for the most part, to discuss the film's production history, shooting on Malta (which he used as a stand-in for 19th-century Marseilles), and various technical and lighting issues. Easy navigation and simple menus round out the disc. Sound options include Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround in English and French. Subtitles are available in Spanish.