"The Mask of Zorro" really strikes sparks only twice once is a dance scene between those hot-blooded kids, Banderas and Zeta-Jones, and another is an erotically charged duel scene, in which they cross blades, wills and, ultimately, tongues. But Wilson's chap is dour, bland, grouchy, unmemorable, a serious flaw in the movie's melodramatic calculations. What a nasty Montero Basil Rathbone would have made what a nasty one Sean Bean or Steven Berkoff would make. He seems to get these parts when other, more charismatic actors turn them down. Stuart Wilson, who specializes in villainy (as in "Lethal Weapon 3"), plays the vicious, hypocritical Governor Montero.
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Evil despotism having returned to old California, he recruits a new Zorro, a young thief, to wage war on a Spanish governor who is enslaving peasants to mine the gold from El Dorado to buy California from Mexico (it's roughly 1841) the movie could also be called "Indiana Zorro and the Lost Gold Mine." There's even a beachboy-looking blond American named "Love" (Matt Letscher) around to bedevil everyone and die of close encounters of the sword kind. As "Mask" has it, the old Zorro Anthony Hopkins, bringing Hamlet's moody gravitas to a movie that in no other way deserves or matches it escapes from prison after 20 years growing a beard and nurturing a steely glare. It seems stolen from one of the lost episodes of "The Wild, Wild West," the old western that tried to stick secret agent conspiracy shenanigans in among the sagebrush and the arroyos.
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He finds the usual astonishing number of trees, flagpoles, castle battlements and, oh yes, flagpoles, to snap that lash around and then zip himself out of trouble as though he's got one of those James Bond space rocket dealies on his back. I also like a man with a graduate level degree in bullwhip gymnastics and improvised field evacuation techniques.
Zorro, after all, is the original man in black as well as the original masked man, and Banderas gets all the moves right more important, he looks good in tight pants. The accent, therefore, may be accurate but the moves are nevertheless predictable, though to be fair, they still enchant. Usually played by grinning gringos of the Tom Dewey-mustache variety, like a Fairbanks, a Power or a Guy Williams, he is here played by a gentleman for the first time both authentically Hispanic and authentically mustache-less, Antonio Banderas. Zorro, which means "fox" in Spanish, has been around since a crime reporter with a lurid imagination and a leaden pen made him up in 1919. As movies go, it's a little bit better than okay. It's fun at about 62 percent of the level that the old Errol Flynn swashbucklers hit in the late '30s. "The Mask of Zorro" is entertaining without being exhilarating.
There's something about Elena.Īs for the rest of the thing, it can be summed up as follows: I went to a sword fight the other night, and a movie broke out. The American mercenary renegade likes her. Zorro's mentor likes her, because he used to be Zorro and he is in fact her papa. Zeta-Jones plays well, the plot is somewhat garbled, as if modeled on a piece of wrought iron from the balconies of Barcelona but let us just say, she's the girl. This would be the big news in the film: Catherine Zeta-Jones, instant star, the new Rita Hayworth, as in, yes, I say again, yes yes yesyesyes. In "The Mask of Zorro," you see a figure with hot flashing eyes, the lightning-quick moves of a panther, a deftly flicking sword arm that could inscribe the New York Times crossword on a button, and a passion that reaches out of the screen and grabs you by the lapels.
Antonio Banderas hides behind "The Mask of Zorro."
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