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I’ll be honest. I’m not a fan of sequels in general—especially when they follow a good first movie. Too many times, the original movie didn’t need a sequel, and the new story just feels tacked on. Plus, the new movies are rarely as good at the originals. Still, I enjoyed 1998’s The Mask of Zorro so much that I had to rent its sequel, The Legend of Zorro. I thought maybe, just maybe, it would surprise me and be just as good as its predecessor.
It wasn’t.
In the new movie, Alejandro de la Vega (Antonio Banderas) is torn between his two conflicting lives: his role as a family man, devoted to his wife, Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and his son, Joaquin (Adrian Alonso); and his role as the masked swashbuckling hero, Zorro. After he breaks his promise to Elena to hang up the mask for good, she files for divorce. Later, acting as a spy herself, Elena finds herself sucked into a web of conspiracies and lies when she starts seeing a French count named Armand. Eventually, Zorro, Elena and Joaquin work out their relationship issues and team up to fight evil together and save the new state of California from a devastating terrorist attack.
It really upsets me when a great movie like The Mask of Zorro has such a disappointing sequel. The original had it all—a great revenge story that was reminiscent of part of Sweeney Todd, the training of a new hero, an enticing love story, and great action sequences. The sequel had none of that. The plot was boring and its execution was clunky, the characters were much more one-dimensional this time around, and the action sequences (among other things) were kind of cartoony. And it’s not exactly a short movie, either—its 129-minute runtime felt very tedious, especially since the movie could easily have been much shorter.
True, there have certainly been worse sequels made. The Legend of Zorro, as clunky as it was, still wasn’t nearly as bad as something like Legally Blonde 2. At least it didn’t completely ruin the whole Zorro concept for me—I’ll still be able to enjoy the original movie. But don’t feel too bad if you skip this one, because you won’t miss much.
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