Handsome, charismatic and, at 37, remarkably agile and athletic, Antonio Banderas is ideally cast as the masked Mexican avenger and saviour of the downtrodden in Martin Campbell's lavish and largely entertaining swashbuckler, The Mask Of Zorro.
The character of Zorro was introduced by the pulp fiction writer, Johnston McCulley in 1919 in his serialised novel, The Curse Of The Capistrano. Within a year, Douglas Fairbanks was playing him on screen in The Mark Of Zorro, and he was followed by many more Zorros in cinema and on television, among them Tyrone Power, Clayton Moore, Guy Williams, Sean Flynn (son of Errol), Alain Delon, and George Hamilton, who gave the role a camp spin in the 1982 spoof, Zorro The Gay Blade.
As the new film begins, Zorro is played by Anthony Hopkins and getting down to some vigorous swordplay. The year is 1821, Spain's domination of Mexico is coming to an end, and the ruthless Spanish governor Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson) is about to return to Europe. Before he leaves, however, he sets about settling scores with his nemesis, Zorro, whose wife is killed in the ensuing fracas and whose baby daughter is abducted by the governor, while Zorro himself is jailed.
Twenty years on, the ageing Zorro escapes at a time when Don Rafael is scheming to buy California from Santa Ana - and to pay for it in gold stolen from the Californian mines. Zorro finds a protege and surrogate son - and prospective son-in-law - in Alejandro, a gauche and scruffy bandido played by a de-glamorised Banderas. Taken under Zorro's wing for a major makeover, Alejandro is transformed into an expert swordsman and smooth operator who will carry on the Zorro legend and finally put Don Rafael in his place.
This all makes for spirited screen entertainment, except that the movie unwisely succumbs to the current tendency to overstay its welcome with an excessive running time of two-and-a-quarter hours. Much of the slack lies in the film's over-plotted attempt to situate its essentially simplistic narrative within its historical and geographical context. In that respect, it recalls Roman Polanski's Chinatown, which admirably explored a back story of the development of Los Angeles. But, to quote Polanski's film, "this ain't Chinatown". And such lofty aspirations are pointless in a context where virtually all the characters are stereotypes - the soldiers are invariably inept and stupid, and the peasants who populate the picture are uniformly hopeless and helpless.
Thankfully, the stars throw themselves into their roles with panache and an infectious sense of enjoyment, with the spirited Banderas joined by an engagingly deadpan Anthony Hopkins, while another Welsh actor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, plays Zorro's grownup daughter - herself no slouch with a sword - with a striking screen presence which bodes very well for her future. A grand score by James Horner accompanies the flamboyant, expertly choreographed duels of flashing steel. Michael Dwyer The Parent Trap (PG) General release
Having scored such a hit with their remake of Father Of The Bride that it spawned a sequel, the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer turn their attention to another updated remake, this time Disney's sweet 1961 comedy, The Parent Trap, in which the 15-year-old Hayley Mills delightfully played twin sisters plotting to reunite their estranged parents played by Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith.
The new version, Nancy Meyers's first film as a director, features the 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan as both twins, Annie and Hallie, with Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid as their parents, Elizabeth and Nick, who meet and marry during a whirlwind romance aboard the QE2. Separating soon afterwards, they selfishly think only of themselves and break up the twins - Elizabeth, who works as a dress designer in London, retaining custody of Annie, and Nick taking Hallie with him to his Napa Valley vineyard. Neither twin is aware of the other's existence until they meet at summer camp in Maine; why Elizabeth dispatches her daughter to another continent to go to summer camp is never satisfactorily explained. Switching identities, the two girls scheme to bring their parents back together.
In this glossy remake the key characters live pampered lives in a world of wraparound opulence, the way people did in the glossy Doris Day comedies of the 1960s. Although it's over-stretched at over two hours long, it's an amusing entertainment, with the appealing Lohan adroitly playing the twin sisters, and Richardson and an unusually laid-back Quaid contributing a light and sunny comedic touch. The solid supporting players include Lisa Ann Walker as Hallie's wise and patient nanny, and Simon Kunz as Annie's wise and patient butler. Michael Dwyer
Year Of The Horse (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin, from Monday
A concert film shot by director Jim Jarmusch during Neil Young and Crazy Horse's 1996 American and European tour, Year Of The Horse grew out of their initial collaboration when Young scored Jarmusch's offbeat 1995 western, Dead Man. The concert film also incorporates footage shot by Young himself - under his movie-making pseudonym, Bernard Shakey - on the band's 1976 and 1986 tours, along with reflections on the band's former guitarist, Danny Whitten, who died in 1972 - a victim of the needle and the damage done.
Eschewing flashy camerawork and editing, Jarmusch strips the concert movie format down to its rawest basics in Year Of The Horse, which he filmed mostly on grainy Super-8, but he most unwisely stalls the movie time and again by interspersing the concert material with self-indulgent and irrelevant home movie-style backstage material which borders on Spinal Tap territory - and meandering, pointless interviews with Young's father and the band's long-time manager, Elliott Roberts.
This dissipates the impact of the often terrific onstage peformances of Young and his band: drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot, and guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampredo, who calls Jarmusch "a hip, trendy New York kind of artsy fartsy film producer . . . oh, director".
"I'm the guitarist in the band called Crazy Horse," is how Neil Young modestly introduces himself at the outset. Aged 51 when the 1996 tour took place, Young looks haggard but performs with the tremendous passion, virtuosity and distinctive, plaintive tones that have made him one of rock music's great surviving icons. There's no finer example of those qualities in the movie than the blistering and soaringly sustained treatment of the magisterial Like A Hurricane, which builds to a thrilling crescendo. Michael Dwyer
On Connait La Chanson (members and guests) IFC, Dublin
With a few honourable exceptions, film directing is not an occupation for old men, so it's remarkable how many French directors who made their first marks during or before the nouvelle vague, many of them now in their 70s, are still making vibrant, popular films. Not least among these is Alain Resnais, whose reputation rests largely upon such icily intelligent films as Last Year in Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, both made almost four decades ago. His latest film, though, has been a surprise popular hit in France, and it's not hard to see why.
On the surface, On Connait La Chanson is a typically Parisian tale of bourgeois alienation, love and loneliness, observing the tangled relationships of a loosely connected chain of people bound together by attraction, emotional dependence and financial need. But Resnais, unusually for a French director, is an ardent anglophile, an admirer of Dennis Potter and Alan Ayckbourn in particular (his last offering, Smoking/No Smoking, was a rather quixotic adaptation of two Ayckbourn plays). His new film is billed as "inspired by the work" of Potter, and appropriates the British writer's technique of using popular songs to heighten and punctuate the narrative. Unlike Potter, though, Resnais never gives us the chance to relax into the cheap dreams of the songs, which range from 1930s ballads to the kind of sub-disco 1970s ditties which have given French pop music a bad name world-wide. His characters start miming to snatches of music at the most unexpected and inappropriate moments, but we never hear more than a couple of lines before we returning to the naturalistic setting. The effect is at once alarming and engaging, humorous and unsettling, and it lends this surprisingly light romantic concoction an air of dry humour that raises it well above the ordinary. Hugh Linehan
Michael Dwyer looks back over the best and worst movies of 1998 in next Friday's Vision page.
