Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A veritable cascade of betrayals, daring escapes, sword fights and intricately plotted deceptions, The Count of Monte Cristo is an old-fashioned swashbuckler stretched beyond conventional limits. At three hours, it sets out to buckle far too many swashes for its own good. But directors Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte do have a lot of story to tell. And Alexandre Dumas’s doorstep novel is a stew of genres: what begins as an adventure brightens into romance before darkening into a revenger’s tragedy. All post-Napoleonic life is here.The year is 1815. Heroic sailor Edmond Dantès dives into a stormy sea to rescue a mysterious woman who, unknown to him, is carrying a letter from the recently deposed emperor. When this incriminating letter turns up in his own belongings — the dirty work of his vicious commanding officer, working in cahoots with a corrupt prosecutor and Danglars (Patrick Mille), Dantès’s duplicitous friend — he is arrested in the middle of his own wedding and plunged into captivity. Decades later, now in possession of vast wealth and a new identity, Dantès returns to France to find and punish the dastardly men who conspired against him.As the count, an indefatigable Pierre Niney cuts a noble but increasingly vampiric figure, swirling through his overstuffed château in slow motion as Jérôme Rebotier’s brooding score surges from an ominous drone into the kind of full orchestral thrash favoured in the historical romances of yesteryear. The camera zooms and swoops like a duelling gentleman’s sword; brazenly excessive CGI delivers the dankest dungeons, most perilous mountain paths and grandest palaces imaginable. Nothing here is remotely believable, which is the pleasure of it. Sit back and abandon yourself to the full weight of Dumas’s 18 volumes of derring-do, related not perfectly but with an infectious energy. Et après le déluge, mes amis, to the bar!★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 30
