The Count of Monte Cristo review - 'a fleet-footed three-hour epic'

This latest take on the classic novel by Alexander Dumas turns the Count into a kind of 19th century Batman, replete with a vast fortune, a tricked-out mansion and a wealth of disguises, writes Alistair Harkness

The Count of Monte Cristo | Jerome Prebois

The Count of Monte Cristo (12A) ★★★★☆

Black Dog (12A) ★★★☆☆

Paradise is Burning (15) ★★★☆☆

It’s hard to go wrong with The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexander Dumas’ classic tale of betrayal, revenge and epic derring-do is so stuffed with adventure and intrigue that the biggest challenge for any adaptation is deciding what to leave out. Luckily, this lavish French-language version doubles down on the story’s cinematic elements, turning them into a fleet-footed three-hour epic that passes by in a flash.

Set over 20 years, it starts in fairytale mode with low-born sailor, Edmond Dantès (played by Pierre Niney), heroically saving a drowning woman and subsequently being promoted to captain of his own vessel. This respectability boost clears the way for him to marry his one true love, Mercédès Herrera (Anaïs Demoustier), daughter of the wealthy family who paid for his naval education in return for his own humble father’s years of service as their butler. 

No good dead goes unpunished, though, and when the woman Danté earlier saved is implicated in a Napoleonic plot, he’s falsely accused of treason on his wedding day and betrayed by several acquaintances for reasons it will take him years to unpick. 

But years is exactly what he has. Sent to an island prison off the coast of Marseille, the next 14 will be spent piecing together who deserves his wrath. Aiding him is Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), an imprisoned man-of-the-cloth who teaches him everything he knows, from foreign languages to the location of a vast fortune of stolen loot buried deep within the island of Monte Cristo. When Danté eventually manages to break out – in a fabulously orchestrated spot of escapology – he tracks down this fortune and re-invents himself as the titular nobleman, ready to take revenge on all who have wronged him.

Directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière – who also wrote last year’s feisty two-part adaptation of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers – have a lot of fun turning the Count into a kind of 19th century Batman, replete with a vast fortune, a tricked-out mansion and a wealth of disguises that enable him to infiltrate his old life incognito. He also takes in two protégés (Anamaria Vartolomei and Julien De Saint Jean) with connections to his past and enlists them in the elaborately plotted revenge he’s planning to exact on the three men directly responsible for his incarceration. 

It’s a juicy plot and because the film takes its time setting up Danté’s wronged-man status we’re fully invested in his thirst for payback. Yet it doesn’t downplay the consequences of vengeance. Part of the reason the film works so well is it retains Dumas’ moral dimension, squeezing every ounce of melodrama from it. The end result is old-fashioned storytelling done with modern-day panache. 

Chinese blockbuster director Hu Gang (The Eight Hundred) changes tempo with his latest film Black Dog, a low-key tale of an ex-con and the bond he forms with an abandoned mongrel whippet. Set in an arid town in Northern China as the country prepares for the Beijing Olympics, the film follows the taciturn Lang (Eddie Peng) – once a semi-famous musician, now returning home to face the music for his part in the death of a local gangster’s nephew. 

Black Dog | Seventh Art Pictures

As he arrives back home – following a bus crash – there’s an ominous, almost surreal and apocalyptic edge to the town, which looks like it’s on its way to becoming an outpost in a Mad Max movie. That’s thanks in no small part to the stray dogs that seem to have the run of the place, with one dog’s unconfirmed rabid status inspiring particular fear amongst the inhabitants. Lang, though, comes to see said dog as a kindred spirit and, when he subsequently gets a job on the dog-catching team as part of the town’s pre-Olympics clean-up mission, he can’t bring himself to turn her in.

Full of starkly beautiful images that reinforce the story’s allegorical elements, the film also critiques China’s ongoing capitalist re-invention via an irony drenched, Altman-esque soundtrack of diegetic local news bulletins informing the citizenry of the (not-very-evident) economic boost the Olympics will bring forth. It a little bit of a shame, then, that Gang diminishes the film’s power with a surfeit of storylines that require multiple endings to wrap up. When focussed on the straightforward human/canine redemption story at its core, it’s much harder to resist. 

A big winner at last year’s Venice and London film festivals, Swedish coming-of-age movie Paradise is Burning comes on with the frantic energy of its young protagonists as co-writer/director Mika Gustafson cannily lets content dictate form to tell the story of three sisters left to fend for themselves after their mother abandons them. 

Though the plot takes shape around the efforts of eldest sibling Laura (Bianca Delbravo, excellent) to find a parental substitute for an impending social services welfare check, any nominal similarity to last year’s egregiously quirky Brit flick Scrapper is quickly obliterated – first by Gustafson’s grounded lyricism and then by the unusual and subtly wrought friendship that develops between Laura and Hanna (Ida Engvoll), a respectable suburban woman whose willingness to help masks a darker secret little talked about in cinema but baked into this film’s very premise. 

Subplots involving the younger siblings (played by Dilvin Asaad and Safira Mossberg) are more prosaic, but the film does a good job of capturing the sometimes chaotic, sometimes languid state of its young protagonists as they defiantly embrace what’s left of their adolescence with reckless abandon. 

All films in cinemas from 30 August