The Legend of Zorro (2005)
DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell
CAST:
Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rufus Sewell, Nick Chinlund, Adrian Alonso
REVIEW:
Like a depressing number of sequels, The Legend of Zorro, despite reuniting the same director and two of the stars from the original installment, feels like a tired, hollow afterthought that shouldn’t have been made. Despite numerous attempts to recapture the entertainment value of the first Zorro, The Legend of Zorro never comes close to the high energy level and exuberance of its predecessor.
Ten years on, married life ain’t exactly grand for Alejandro (Antonio Banderas) and Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She demands he quit his double life as Zorro (why suddenly now, when she knew he was Zorro before she married him? because the script says she does) and pay more attention to their son Joaquin (Adrian Alonso). After a round of obviously scripted bickering, he’s hit with divorce papers (an almost unheard of occurrence in the 1800s, even more so coming from the wife, but whatever). Alejandro spends the next few months stumbling around drunk, especially when he runs back into Elena on the arm of a new suitor, wealthy Count Armand (Rufus Sewell). Meanwhile, California is voting to join the Union, but some, such as the racist McGivens (Nick Chinlund), are determined to stop this. Of course, Armand and McGivens are connected, and have some dastardly scheme which Zorro must thwart.
The Legend of Zorro has many problems, but one of the most depressing is how vibrant characters like Alejandro and Elena, portrayed with such joy and energy in the first movie, have been reduced to such flat, diminished cardboard cutouts. Despite attempts to generate some of the chemistry they enjoyed in The Mask of Zorro, Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones have lost any ability to generate sparks, and their cliched and forced family bickering is straight out of Generic Plot Complications 101 used when the writers have not one original idea in their collective heads. All life has been leeched out of the two main characters. The hatchet job done with Elena, so vibrant and alive in the first Zorro, is particularly depressing. Here she has been diminished down to a standard-issue nagging wife, devoid of a whiff of the energy and crackling charisma she had when we met her. As for our shallow villains, Rufus Sewell spends too much of his time acting urbane and smugly smirking to convince us he’s more than a preening fop, while Nick Chinlund’s McGivens tries to do some over-the-top teeth-gnashing but doesn’t make any impression. McGivens is too goofy, a straggly-haired, gun-toting, incessantly Bible-quoting (a hypocritically Bible-thumping bad guy, wow, that’s original!) goon who doesn’t seem like a match for a halfway competent town sheriff, let alone Zorro. The first movie’s bad guys, Stuart Wilson’s Rafael Montero and Matt Letscher’s Captain Love, weren’t the most memorable villains ever to grace the screen, but we bought them as worthy adversaries for Zorro more than the second-rate pair here. Adrian Alonso shows more gusto than any of the adults; too bad his energy is wasted in scenes that turn a swashbuckling action-adventure into “family fun”, as the kid takes on bad guys and, of course (Generic Screenwriting 101 again) learns his “cowardly” dad is actually the legendary hero. Oddly, one of the dons from the first Zorro reappears here as Joaquin’s teacher (maybe they figured enough time had passed that we wouldn’t notice them recasting the same actor in a different role).
The biggest problem with The Legend of Zorro is that it is entirely too silly. The Mask of Zorro kept the tone light and irreverent without completely turning the legendary character into a joke. The Legend of Zorro does not. Alejandro and Elena bicker in obviously scripted ways, he staggers around drunk, women see him naked, they get in a series of painfully unfunny “comic relief” arguments, his horse steals his whisky and her pipe, its eyes bulge when it sees an approaching bridge, and of course, Mom, Dad, and Zorro Junior end up kicking the bad guys’ butts. Family fun, woohoo! Except we don’t want to see family fun with little Joaquin shooting bad guys’ butts with slingshots, we want to see swordfights with Zorro and the baddies. Speaking of which, the action in The Legend of Zorro is ho-hum. There’s stuntwork and swordfights, but all thrown at us without much flair or excitement (yet another area in which it falls far short of the high-energy original). None of this is very engaging at all, not even a climactic battle between Alejandro and Armand that gets as ridiculously over-the-top as the bad guys’ scheme. Armand, it turns out, is involved in a secret society that rules the world, and is devising a superweapon to tip the scales of war in the Confederacy’s favor, with a scheme that feels like something James Bond would come up against (also the fact that we’re chronologically set in the 1850s but already talking about the Confederacy and civil war, and have a last-minute throwaway Abe Lincoln cameo, indicate how much anyone involved cared about even perfunctory historical accuracy).
It’s pretty depressing to savor something as exuberant, high-energy, and joyous as The Mask of Zorro, and then follow it up with something as dull and lazy and, usually, just plain dumb as The Legend of Zorro. It’s hard to say whether the sequel might have been better if it’d been made a few years earlier (strike while the iron is hot?), but it feels creaky and out-of-date, and its almost desperate attempts to recapture the exuberance of its predecessor feel forced rather than natural. “Legendary” it’s not. You’re better off giving the original another spin in the DVD player.
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