YMMV / The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

• Catharsis Factor:
  • After getting away with their crimes for fifteen years, it's incredibly satisfying to watch Edmond get his revenge on the people who condemned him to prison for something he was innocent of, particularly since there isn't as much collateral damage from his schemes as in the original novel.
  • While he's not among Edmond's conspirators, Dorleac's death is untold degrees of gratifying. After 15 years of whipping and mocking poor, innocent Dantes, Dorleac gets to see first hand what happens when you take away a good man's faith.
• Complete Monster:
  • Fernand Mondego is the former friend of Edmond Dantes. In order to marry Edmond's fiancée Mercedes, Fernand frames Edmond for treason, sending him to a hellish prison to suffer and die while murdering the father of the corrupt prosecutor Villefort. Becoming a corrupt wastrel, Fernand kills a man he cuckolded, ruining his wife in the process, while taunting Mercedes over the affair. After being outed for what he is and learning Edmond is the true father of Mercedes's son Albert, Fernand tries to manipulate father and son into a death match to save himself. When cornered by Edmond, he tries to shoot Mercedes out of sheer spite before engaging Edmond, stating he cannot bear to live in a world where Edmond has everything while Fernand himself has nothing.
  • Armand Dorleac is the sadistic warden of the Chateau d'If. Despite knowing all the prisoners within the prison are innocent, Dorleac subjects them to horrific conditions and mistreats them all regularly, pronounced by torturing and whipping them upon the anniversary of their incarceration, which begins on the first day of their internment. Visiting Edmond every year to torture and flog him, Dorleac mocks the very idea of punishment, once telling Edmond to ask God for help with the taunting promise to "stop the moment he shows up."
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Remember kids, vengeance is bad. The film will demonstrate that although it appears to be totally awesome, it's nevertheless very, very bad.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The film gives Jim Caviezel long hair and a beard from all those years of incarceration and has him become the Count of Monte Cristo ("Christ" in Latin languages). He later played Jesus Christ himself.
  • The unkempt hair and beard also makes him look like the pre-Man in the Suit John Reese from the first episode of Person of Interest. The Count's carefully planned and methodical destruction of his enemies also bears a great similarity to how Reese operates.
  • The movie makes Dantes the biological father of Albert Mondego (Henry Cavill). This would mean that Jesus was the father of Superman.
• Magnificent Bastard: Edmond Dantes, the titular Count of Monte Cristo, was a guileless and naïve sailor until he was betrayed by his best friend, Fernand Mondego, falsely convicted of treason, and consigned to Chateau d'If. Consumed by revenge, Dantes becomes a darker, more cunning figure, cultivating his intellect under the tutelage of fellow prisoner Abbe Faria. Seizing a chance provided by Faria's tragic death, Dantes smuggles himself out of the prison by switching places with his friend's body, dragging the prison's vile warden to his death in the process. Challenged by pirate Luigi Vampa to kill another pirate, Jacopo, Dantes handily wins the fight, but spares Jacopo, earning his loyalty and winning Vampa's friendship. Reinventing himself as a charming and ruthless nobleman, Dantes enacts a plot for revenge. Earning the trust of Mondego's son Albert—later revealed to truly be Dantes' own son—through a staged rescue, Dantes tricks his enemies into a plot that exposes their crimes, taunting one of them by offering a pistol to avoid prison, only to reveal that the gun wasn't loaded. Winning back Mercedes, the wife Mondego had stolen from him, and bringing Mondego to personal and financial ruin before killing him, Dantes ultimately completes his vengeance, allowing him to move on to a peaceful life with his beloved, their son, and his best friend Jacopo.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Fernand, Danglars and Villefort collectively cross it when they frame and imprison Edmond into prison, more tomb, for their personal gains. They pay for it dearly.
  • Edmond, despite not leaving such a mess as in the original novel, comes close to this when he is more than willing to kill Albert, Fernand's son. Only Mercedes stops him from crossing that line. And since she reveals Albert is in fact his son, he comes dangerously close to Offing the Offspring. Probably this realization prompts him to give Fernand a chance to leave with his life.
• Nightmare Fuel: The whole Château d'If sequence. It's definitely the place where you wouldn't like to wind up. And for claustrophobics the scenes with digging tunnels can be unnerving as well, especially the one where Abbe Faria is killed.
• One-Scene Wonder: Alex Norton as Napoleon has maybe five minutes of screen time, but in that five minutes you absolutely see why this man nearly conquered Europe.
• Retroactive Recognition: Albert Mondego was Henry Cavill's first big movie role.
• The Un-Twist: It's unclear if the film even intends Albert's true parentage to be a twist, given that Edmond and Mercedes are as raven-haired as he, while Fernand is the odd one out with markedly lighter (though still "dark") brown hair. Maybe they should have dyed Cavill's hair. Of course, you could have assumed he took after his mother.

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