There have been dozens of (mostly inadequate) attempts to adapt Alexandre Dumas’ behemoth payback yarn on film and TV, but it doesn’t stop people trying; this time, it’s the team behind the recent two-part Three Musketeers adaptation. Compared to the saturnine Gérard Depardieu in the well-regarded 1998 TV miniseries, lead actor Pierre Niney is a lightweight proposition as the count, playing his second major French icon after Yves Saint Laurent in 2014. But Niney’s physical slightness and poise lend something distinctive here, a hint of vulnerability underneath the multiple masks, a mortal psychological wound that can never be healed.
There’s no improving on Dumas’ timeless setup: young mariner Edmond Dantès (Niney) is imprisoned ad eternum in the Chateau d’If, Marseille’s own Devil’s Island, after being framed as a Bonapartist by shady prosecutor Villefort (Laurent Lafitte) and backstabbed by his pal Fernand (Bastien Bouillon), a rival for the hand of his wife-to-be Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier). Bequeathed an impossible fortune and given a crash course in the gentlemanly arts by fellow inmate Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), Dantès re-emerges in Parisian high society as the enigmatic aristocrat. Behind the swank orientalist mansion and unimpeachable manners is a simmering volcano of revenge. In other words: he’s French Batman.
Directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, screenwriters on the Musketeers films, perform the necessary surgery on the novel with efficiency and even elegance. In place of Dumas’ sprawl, they concentrate the intrigue in two protégés: dagger-eyed foundling André (Julien de Saint Jean) and comely Ottoman princess Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), whose romances are designed to hit the count’s betrayers where it hurts. The pace is so strident, though, across the film’s three acts that neither the original themes (vengeance v justice; the count’s God complex) or newly introduced ones (a very social-media era emphasis on the reality behind the facade) leave more than a faint imprint.
The pay-off is a fast-moving, good-looking gallop of Mission: Impossible-style mask play, languorous conniving in courtyards and occasional outbreaks of derring-do that chews up three hours without pausing for quail sandwiches. It’s also couched in a white-bread Netflix-esque production style that’s big on drone approaches into opulent chateaux and bounding up staircases; handy for streaming sales, but less so for locating the rancour and gothic undertones that gave gravity to Dumas’ maximalism.
Fortunately Niney is fully in the swing of things, lapping up campy disguise scenes that are oddly reminiscent of Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther series, acting in French, Italian, English and Franglais, and lording up one brutal dinner-party revelation. But he does finer work alongside Demoustier in the scenes where the long-sundered lovers are reunited but unable to acknowledge it; their micro-expressions signal bottomless fathoms of emotion. The dramatisation itself could have used more of this rapier finesse to complement its insistent whip hand.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is in UK and Irish cinemas from 30 August.
