The Legend of Zorro

What would you get if “Peter Pan”’s Captain Hook and “Family Matters” star Steve Urkel decided to raise a child together?

A kid with a love of numbingly-elaborate swordplay, an itch for preschool humor, and a bunch of very irritated classmates. In other words, an evil cinematic mastermind.

Director Martin Campbell seems to be the maniacal spawn of this unholy entertainment tryst. Campbell’s “The Legend of Zorro” (a sequel to his 1998 hit “The Mask of Zorro”) has more puerile laughs than it has plot in its two lurching, painful hours. This movie is like a bottle of Jägermeister: painful on the way down, dizzying once it’s in you, and awful for your liver.

The film opens as Zorro (Antonio Banderas) safeguards a vote on California statehood from a gang of mercenaries.

But wait! Suddenly, Zorro is quarrelling with his wife Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) about their son. And, oh my! Two suspicious men are shadowing Elena to find out “her husband’s secrets!”

Such suspense! Wouldn’t you like to know where the story is really heading? Too bad. Campbell doesn’t care much about cogency; he’s too busy jumping hyperactively from plotline to plotline.

The movie grudgingly develops a storyline in its second half. Government agents force Elena to divorce Zorro and to seduce Archduke Wilhelm (Michel Bos), a member of a European guild plotting to destroy the United States. Zorro must stop the dastardly scheme: in come the sabers and muskets! However, these badly-choreographed, ten-on-one battles are sickeningly artificial. Enjoying them is less a question of suspending belief than throwing it off a cliff and leaving it for dead.

“Legend”’s one-dimensional excuses for characters are as mediocre as the action scenes. Elena is by far the worst of these. Campbell keeps her too busy with the movie’s men for her to develop her own character.

The fact that she gets so much screen time with so little personality makes watching her adventures a fairly empty exercise—except, of course, for her aesthetic contribution. Banderas’ Alejandro serves more or less the same purpose; unless you’re looking for lessons in overacting, watching this movie is no better than buying a pin-up.

If the film stumbles with its main characters, it crashes to the ground with its politics. The writers make the villainous archduke’s guild a jingoistic metaphor for “anti-American” Europe. With this society of nations bent on crushing all possible threats on the path towards European world dominance, Campbell tries to capitalize on lingering American hostility towards a continent that vociferously opposed the war in Iraq.

It’s ludicrous that an action-comedy would try to proselytize in the first place. It’s downright hilarious given the number of historical errors it contains: Col. Beauregard talks about the “Confederate States” more than a decade before the Confederacy formed. Perhaps no one sees a Zorro movie for a history lesson, but it’s just as unlikely they see it for a political sermon.

Likely, Zorro fans will still flock to this standard light-action fare. Judging by Campbell’s success with the Bond flick “Goldeneye,” he’s capable of pulling a crowd to see their favorite character, no matter how hackneyed the adventure. However, viewers with taste who are sick of this trite gruel might sympathize with a seven-year-old who had to watch Alejandro and Elena kiss during the press screening: “Ewww!”