Recipe for a block-buster movie: Pick a cultural icon, add in liberal amounts of swashbuckling action, a touch of sizzling chemistry between the two main actors and a plot involving saving lives and you're set.
Recipe for a block-buster sequel: Take the above formula, over-cook the action to ridiculous levels, remove 90% of the chemistry and scale up the "save the xxxxx" plot to involve thousands.
And the sequel formula is what you get with Legend of Zorro. An overdone, overlong and emasculated pale imitation of the first movie.
The action is just plain ridiculous. In fact, it insults your intelligence. Wagons careen through streets on two-wheels, horses leap from bridges onto moving trains and Zorro himself becomes more acrobatic than Jet Li and Jackie Chan rolled into one. It's just plain dumb. A clear example of more being less. To mis-quote Jeff Goldblum's character from Jurassic Park "These people (script-writers and CGI Artists) were so preoccupied with the fact that they could do something they never stopped to think if they should do it!" In short, LOZ is a horrible follow-up to Mask of Zorro. It may have the same setting, characters and even actors. But it's just a horrible mess. that is a shadow of the first movie. Plus, it commits the cardinal sin of any movie - it introduces a child for the sole purpose of irritating adults and making kids like the movie.
In keeping with this more kid-friendly abomination, LOZ features very few deaths. Sure, the lead bad guys all buy the farm, but their minions uniformly fail to be killed by Zorro, leading to the logical conclusion that either a) Zorro is useless, or b) the movie is hideously PC. As a result of this "nice, less gory" Zorro, the movie lacks any punch or real drama. It becomes what it is - a pointless action movie with no surprises and little thought required.
And don't get me started on the horse jokes. "Idiot" doesn't begin to describe whoever wrote those scenes.
Just who are these movies aimed at? Anyone who is either educated, of average or above intelligence or who has any real world experience whatsoever, must surely find these films patronizing and insulting. Are we then to assume that the majority of the movie-going public are uneducated, below par intelligence or 12 years old or younger?
It is once again a sad day for movies.
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