The Big Picture: The Count of Monte Cristo (PG)

At last, the full Monte

Intrigue, rivalry, swordplay, romance, betrayal, and a cameo by Napoleon Bonaparte: amazing what a movie can pack into its first 15 minutes. The Count of Monte Cristo has long been overdue a remake (the last one I recall starred Richard Chamberlain) and in director Kevin Reynolds's hands it comes up not merely buffed and gleaming, but fitted with an engine that makes it fairly roar along. Even when it slows down in the middle section, its narrative handling hardly slackens: this is a Monte Cristo you can count on.

Kevin Reynolds first made a splash with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which for all its silliness handled the legend with verve and more than a pinch of wit. Too bad his next one, Waterworld, capsized utterly, though it's a failure one tends to associate with the other Kevin, Costner. (It began a sequence of duds from which he has not yet emerged). Reynolds seems to have recovered his poise here, and his screenwriter Jay Wolpert has adapted the Dumas classic to suit modern ears without straying into crass anachronisms. Hats off, too, to fight arranger Bill Hobbs and fight co-ordinator Michael Carliez, who give more swash for your buckle. Swordsmanship has come a long way since the days of Errol Flynn and the almost comical speed of clashing rapiers. Here the parry and thrust feel more dangerous, and the blood on the blades looks like the real thing.

The film also profits from the casting of two actors who aren't yet superstars; their middle-ranking status lends a freshness that bigger names might not have mustered. Jim Caviezel, whose haunted presence was the most memorable aspect of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, here plays the brave but guileless sailor Edmond Dantès, ensnared in a Bonapartist conspiracy and subsequently betrayed by the man he believed was his friend, Fernand Mondego. The latter, a scion of nobility, envies his low-born companion for his courage, eligibility and, most tormenting of all, the lovely Mércèdes (Dagmara Dominczyk). Mondego, Mércèdes – perhaps Dantès' mistake was not to be named after a car. As the traitor, Guy Pearce assumes a fabulously unpleasant hauteur, raising his nostrils like twin barrels of a shotgun and revelling in the supercilious drawl of a spoilt-brat aristo. (He also sports a bouffant hairdo to rival the Seventies Warren Beatty). Compare this with his straight-arrow detective in LA Confidential and his amnesiac revenger in Memento, and you see an actor whose versatility could be his route to greatness.

Indeed, I rather missed Pearce's swagger during the dark years of Dantès' confinement in Chateau D'If, a remote prison island where the French authorities "put the ones they're ashamed of". Dantès' family and friends have been told that he's dead, and as far as Dantès is concerned he might as well be. If ever accommodation could get a man down, this narrow prison cell could. And nothing to look forward to but the annual flogging from the warden (Michael Wincott). Caviezel, his hair and beard grown wild, seems to carry the grind of these years in his pleading and nobly Christ-like countenance. Just when hope for him (and the movie) is fading, a strange irruption through his cell floor changes everything, a tortured, skeletal apparition looking slightly more ancient than Methuselah: it's Richard Harris. He plays the Abbé Faria, a prisoner whose escape tunnel has taken a wrong turn into Dantès's cell. While the pair get digging together, Faria schools Dantès in economics, philosophy, swordsmanship and the delicate cuisine of flambé rat, instruction that the younger man believes will equip him for cooking up revenge. But Faria warns him that the dish mightn't be as tasty as he expects.

Harris seems to enjoy himself as the wizened sage, his mischievous twinkle a counterpoint to Caviezel's brooding. When Dantès has hit rock bottom, he tells Faria he has counted the 7000-odd stones of his cell. "Have you named them yet?" Faria asks cheerily. The film takes itself just seriously enough, without neglecting the potential of light comedy, later embodied in the lively mumming of Luis Guzmán as Jacopo, a piratical sidekick whose life Dantès once spared in a knife-fight. He gives his loyalty in return. "I swear this to you by my dead relatives," runs his oath, "and even by the ones who aren't that well." I also had high expectations of Freddie Jones, briefly illumining the screen as the Bonapartist conspirator Colonel Villefort, but he exits prematurely with a bullet through his heart.

The third act of the film, in which Dantès returns to Paris in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo, doesn't disappoint, though you may have to suspend disbelief for a while. How is it, for instance, that Mondego fails to recognise Dantès, even if the latter now wears a beard and fancy clothes? Surely a 13-year hiatus wouldn't wipe out the memory of a face. And shouldn't Guy Pearce look a little more dissipated than he does? He is, after all, supposed to have whored and drunk his way through an inheritance, not to mention a career moonlighting in "piracy, corruption and murder". He looks amazingly well on it.

There's also a feeling that the film promises more thematically than it delivers. From Dantès' anguished prison dialogues with Faria, one gleans the impression of a soul divided between a thirst for revenge and an inkling that revenge is not the balm he imagines. This is where a knowledge of the Dumas novel might be helpful: we get a glimpse of Dantès' inner conflict, but psychology takes a back seat to swashbuckling as Reynolds and co thunder towards the denouement. But I can'tblame them: the closing fight is a stunner. This ripe entertainment, nicely shot by Gosford Park cinematographer Andrew Dunn, delights the eye and quickens the pulse; for the mind, well, it's a quiet stroll in the park.