MOVIE REVIEW: The Legend of Zorro

A poor sequel. Let down by a flimsy script and consequently average performances.

Which is a shame, because it looked the goods. Two of the primary actors returned in Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta Jones, to combine with the original director, Martin Campbell. Production design and quality was largely high, although took unexpected and sudden dips in scenes near the end, culminating in a particularly 1990's quality CG explosion, despite previous fantastic explosions in other sequences in the film. I guess their gunpowder budget ran out...

The script is what led to the major let down. The cleverness of the first movie was how it combined two seperate but equally important story lines for the main charachters, Zorro Snr and Jnr, while they fought the villain for 'the people'. The parallel stories of family were the motivators for the interesting intersecting charachters portrayed by Banderas and Anthony Hopkins. This time though, the script was comparatively flimsy, and only had the single main 'evil villain' story line and the motivations of the primary charachters was largely underdeveloped and unrealistic. Futher more, Banderas' Zorro this time around had no mentor, a particularly successful element of the first movie, but in a terrible attempt to increase his dialogue, Banderas ends up speaking to his horse for a large parts of the film! Similarly Zeta-Jones' charachter is also often alone, and because of the singular direction from the perspective of Zorro, her scenes are devoid of emotion and intensity. There are plenty more problems, first and foremost being that the story is shite! People being enslaved is worth Zorro's trouble. Preserving the democratic process is a stretch! The villainous 'conspiracy' was ridiculous, plastic explosives are hardly terrifying, and why are there chinese bomb makers working indoors, at night, wearing huge rice paddy hats?!