There are a couple of bright spots in the film. The location work is at times stunning, featuring a glorious Mediterranean Malta and some sumptuous Irish estates standing in for Marseilles, Paris, Monte Cristo and Rome. And the costuming is ace: The Count gets a hint of Oriental flair, and Guy Pearce bulges from his tailored plumage in all the wrong places.

Jim Caviezel as the Count is a bit of a cipher, but he manages to keep from breaking into peals of laughter when he says things like, "Why did you send me to hell?" Guy Pearce, on the other hand, is absurdly overblown as the pouty rich-boy friend. He practically drools over Mercedes, salivating like a sallow-cheeked underwear model staring at a line of coke. Both could learn a few moves from Richard Harris' aging, imprisoned Abbe, who ambles around his cell with a step that says he hasn't been beaten down yet.

The main problem in "Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo" is that the filmmakers think they're making an action movie that demands a tightly edited sword fight every 15 minutes. It's easy to see where they got confused -- after all, revenge drives most action movies. But the original Monte Cristo story moves not on action, per se, but procedure. It's like a detective novel. The important thing is not that the Count gets his men, but how he gets them.

That's a part of the story that the 1934 version of the movie, starring Robert Donat, rendered well. That version is generally considered the best adaptation of the novel. The new one borrows some of its plot devices. But in its own way, the old classic is equally ridiculous: The difference between the two is that the 1934 version overplays the talky exposition -- it's all procedure and very little life.

The brilliant conceit of the novel -- left out of the picture -- is that the Count of Monte Cristo tailors his revenge with extraordinary patience, uncovering each man's fatal flaw and exploiting it so the villains practically do themselves in. We never doubt that he's just, that he deserves revenge, that he can choose who lives and who dies. Neither does he, and ultimately his hubris kills an innocent, an accident that humbles a man who more or less believed himself more than just an agent of justice. He's not God, he realizes.

The film never allows for that kind of shading. It has the base character arc that we expect from a serviceable screenplay: The Count knows love as Dantes, becomes consumed with revenge, and then becomes overpowered by love. At the end, he realizes his family is more important than anything. Watching it unfold, you come to wish the Count would just kill you in your movie seat. To borrow a conceit from the film, his pistol isn't even loaded.

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