REVIEWED - THE LEGEND OF ZORRO: IN MARTIN Campbell's spirited The Mask of Zorro (1998), Zorro Senior (Anthony Hopkins) handed down the mask and mantle of heroism to his dashing son, Don Alejandro de la Vega (Antonio Banderas). There are echoes of Spy Kids and The Incredibles in Campbell's swashbuckling sequel, as Zorro Junior's family gets in on the act.
Alejandro's feisty wife Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) takes on two stalkers with her fists and a spade, and their 10-year-old son (Adrian Alonso) improvises with rulers for a classroom desktop duel with a grumpy teacher. Meanwhile, Zorro himself gets down to business from the outset in a swordfight played on precariously narrow timber supports high above a river.
The movie is set in 1850, as California is about to become the 31st state of the union. Perpetuating a stereotypical view of that state's inhabitants, the film depicts some of the locals as exceptionally dim-witted. For example, when a runaway train is racing down a track, they react not by getting out of its path but foolishly running backwards and forwards in front of it.
Elena, who is impeccably groomed at all times, works her way through a wardrobe of fetching costumes, but style appears to be lost on a key baddy who - in that era before designer dentistry came to California - is reduced to wearing wooden teeth. The swankier principal villain is, predictably, European, a supposedly French aristocrat blankly played by Rufus Sewell.
The agile stuntmen and Zorro's temperamental, pipe-smoking horse come off best in this sprawling yarn, which lacks the historical grounding of its predecessor and unwisely stretches an exceedingly wispy storyline across two hours and 10 minutes. Amazingly, it took four credited screenwriters to concoct that contrived and implausible narrative.
The scenery is consistently pleasant.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)