The Legend of Zorro movie review (2005)

Now come Banderas and Zeta-Jones again, with the same director, Martin Campbell, and of all of the possible ideas about how to handle the Elena character, this movie has assembled the worst ones. The sublime adventuress has turned into the kind of wife who wants her husband to quit Zorroing because "you do not know your own son," and besides Zorro comes home late, she never knows where he is, etc. We are inflicted with such dialogue as:

"People still need Zorro!"

"No -- you still need Zorro!"

"You're overreacting!"

Saints preserve us from Mr. and Mrs. Zorro as the Bickersons. And what are we to make of their son, Joaquin (a good little actor named Adrian Alonso), who dresses like Little Lord Fauntleroy but has developed, apparently by osmosis, all of the skills of his father, such as shadowing bad guys, eavesdropping on plots, improvising in emergencies and exposing a dastardly scheme to overthrow the government.

He's a bright kid, but not bright enough to recognize that Zorro is his own father. To be sure, Zorro wears a mask, but let me pose a hypothetical exercise for my readers. Imagine your own father. That's it. Now place him in a typical setting: Pushing back from the dinner table, cutting off some jerk in an intersection, or scratching his dandruff. Now imagine your dad wearing black leather pants, a black linen shirt, a black cloak, a flat black hat, and a black mask that covers his eyes. Got that? Now imagine him pushing back from the table. Still your dad, right? You can almost hear your mom: "Now don't you go getting any ideas about that whip."

To be sure, Zorro's work keeps him away from home a lot, which is one of the things Elena is complaining about. Maybe the son has never seen his father. In that case, Elena has a point. Meanwhile, the villains have a plot to use a superweapon in order to bring about the collapse of the union and protect us from "inferior races," by which they mean Zorro and all of his kind. Strange, how movie characters who hate "inferior races" somehow themselves never look like breeding stock. If they reproduced, they would found a line of dog whisperers and undersecretaries of defense.

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