The Count of Monte Cristo review – a good-looking gallop through Dumas’ tale of revenge

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.