Metacritic reviews

It's a heady mix of the earnest, the grave, and the frivolous. Wizardly director Kevin Reynolds even manages to condense into a single shot, with a wisp of humor, several of the hero’s long years in a dungeon without making them any less grueling.

Performances by Jim Caviezel and Richard Harris make this a great adventure.

This is the kind of adventure picture the studios churned out in the Golden Age -- so traditional it almost feels new.

It pays homage to the genre's most glorious days.

As a revenge thriller, the movie is serviceable, but it doesn't really deliver the delicious guilty pleasure of the better film versions.

For younger audiences drawn by the attractive actors, this might be their introduction to the Dumas epic. At least it's an effective and rousing version.

With more buckling than swash, The Count of Monte Cristo is a good-looking, poorly acted washout.

James Caviezel makes us care more about that innocent romantic, Edmond Dantes, than we may care to care about the rest of the picture, which entertains in fits and starts, with startling ruptures in tone.

This latest version, made with the MTV generation in mind, is arguably the least impressive of the filmed Counts.

This is the time of the year movie studios traditionally dump their mistakes into theaters -- and boy, did Disney make a whopper with The Count of Monte Cristo.