The Legend of Zorro (2005)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rufus Sewell, Nick Chinlund

Have I Seen it Before: Yes? I remember holding the DVD in my hand once about ten years ago, but the movie disappeared from my memory as quickly as the movie finished. It came across my Prime Video suggestions, and while I didn’t have very high expectations for it, but I thought it would be a welcome distractions from the more uncertain hours of the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Then the plot (or at least the first few and last few minutes) turned out to revolve around a contentious vote with the possibility of violence in the streets erupting at any moment.

Whoops.

Did I Like It: On a positive note, I’ll probably forget again the film entirely pretty quickly. It’s difficult to quantify precisely why this movie falls so aggressively short of the imminently enjoyable <The Mask of Zorro (1998)>. That is mainly because there are so many to choose from.

The previous film’s plot was a firecracker of a revenge story, while this one wanders in and out of the process of making California a state (as noted above) and a divorce story that runs far faster than it ought to if we’re to have any hope of caring as much about Elena (Zeta-Jones) and Alejandro (Banderas) as we had tingly feelings for them in the original film.

There’s a lazy detachment to most of the pyrotechnics, leaning heavy on needless green screens and mystifying CGI, where the first was a masterclass in good stuntwork and well choreographed swordplay. Things got so bad that I actually said, “Oh no” after a particularly dodgy flourish from Banderas. The less said about the boring train sequence in the climax, the better. Anyone who complained about anything in <Back to the Future Part III (1990)> owes Robert Zemeckis an apology.

And then there’s this story. I think plenty of the guff screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci have received is pretty overblown. Their work on the original <Star Trek (2009)> holds up, and despite some people’s problems with Kurtzman’s stewardship of the Trek franchise, I think things have been working out splendidly. Maybe Orci is the problem, if he were the dominant force here. As I mentioned above, the storyline is soggy and uninteresting in its own right, regardless of comparisons to the original film. But it’s the stupidity with which the film is treated which makes the film truly irritating. Historical inaccuracies are a reality when one tries to fit real history into an adventure story, or any fiction, really. I know this much for certain. As long as one roughly tries to get things right, or knows to get fuzzy with only the more arcane details, I can forgive plenty. 

But Abraham Lincoln presiding over the ceremony formalizing California statehood? Tell me, do former one term Congressmen the ones they send to finish up making states? Oh, I see. I’m supposed to believe Lincoln is president when the film takes great pains in its opening few seconds to remind me the film takes place in 1850? That’s the kind of glaring historical boner that a school child would have been able to pick out. Unbelievably stupid and needless. Maybe it wasn’t Orci and Kurtzman who made that call, but whoever did was stupid in the extreme.

It was enough to make me want to check election returns again.

Casino Royale (2006)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright

Have I Seen It Before?: I had been aching for a proper adaptation of Fleming’s first novel ever since reading it. The multi-director comedy-adjacent Casino Royale (1967) need not be mentioned here.

Did I like it?: And so one might normally be unable to get over what the film could have been. An EON-produced version in the 60s starring Sean Connery, with Audrey Hepburn as Vesper Lynd and Orson Welles as Le Chiffre (the 1967 did get one thing right) would have been glorious. The rumored efforts of Quentin Tarantino trying to launch an all black-and-white version with Pierce Brosnan (and presumably Uma Thurman as Lynd, with maybe Samuel L. Jackson as Le Chiffre?) would have been bananas and also one of my favorite films of all time. 

So, it is a testament to the glories of this film that I like it so much despite what it could have been. The book is surprisingly faithful to the source material. One might scratch their head at the notion of turning The Big Game from Baccarat to Texas Hold’em Poker, but if anyone watching any of the previous Bond pictures claims they understood how the game of Baccarat works, they’re lying. After years of steeping myself in Bondanalia, all I’ve been able to absorb is the fact that it merges the most frustrating elements of both Craps and Blackjack. How hard is it to hit the number nine?

And yet it keeps enough of the Bond movie trappings to be that particular cinematic flavor one can only find in the Bond series. David Arnold’s score is resurrecting the best of John Barry, the extension to the plot make the adventure not nearly as claustrophobic as Fleming’s story kept matters. One might miss the initial gun-barrel sequence, before one realizes that the entire pre-credit sequence is the origin of the gun barrel itself. The film series has been notorious for playing things safe, but here, every risk pays off. I just don’t understand anyone who thinks things have changed too much or that Bond has become too much like the Bourne series.

As with the initial outing for all of the Bonds, one must take a moment to ascertain the qualities of the man himself. Every Bond with the possible exception of Connery make their strongest outing their first. There was a lot of skepticism from the public about Craig, mostly having to do with his flaxen hair. Here, he is more than equal to the task of taking on the 007 mantle, and with a quality far closer to the Fleming original in ways that were accepted by the public, when only twenty years earlier were scoffed at when brought to life by Timothy Dalton. As I write this review we are—depending on the behavior of a pandemic or two—approaching the end of Craig’s tenure, it’s sort of amazing that the weak links in the chain of his time at the wheel of the Aston Martin would have been considered the best films of many of the other Bonds. He is the second coming of Connery for which many Bond fans were always hoping, and I sit here anxiously awaiting No Time To Die (2020) and wondering how the series will recover from his loss.

GoldenEye (1995)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco, Famke Janssen

Have I Seen It Before?: I may be the only person my relative age who has seen the movie, more than he has played the seminal Nintendo 64 video game, which itself was released in August of 1997, just a few months before the release of the films sequel, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Now you know.

Did I like it?: It’s clearly Brosnan’s best attempt in the role, buying him a measure of goodwill that would get him through the odious, Roger Moore-esque valley that was his swan song, Die Another Day (2002). If he had been more present and awake for his remaining three films in the series, he might have been in the running to rival Sean Connery himself.

Goldeneye is an interesting relic of its time. In the six years since the release—the longest between entries in the series—of Timothy Dalton’s last shot at the role, License to Kill (1989) the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the machismo that had been core to the series up until this point started to feel passé. 

Some wondered if there was room for Bond in such a brave new world.

Which is hilarious, when one realizes that the far more scary and insidious threats were still in our future, and that the era of sexual harassment was not only not over, but was reaching its peak, Clinton-led golden age, and Bronsan is more than equal to the task of lecherously and sort of absent-mindedly forcing himself on women left and right.

The film also has some weird elements that age it squarely in the mid-90s.

Is it possible that Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) is the worst computer hacker ever to be conceived by 1990s film (a steep competition, to be sure)? His passwords are easily guessed words from the English dictionary, it appears one has an unlimited number of guesses to gain access to his systems, his fingers dance insanely over just a few keys of any keyboard (admittedly, he’s not alone among 90s movies hackers on that front), and when things inevitably go south for him in the third act, he takes out his frustrations with a monitor, like that is going to do something to re-set the guidance system of the GoldenEye weapon.

Also, the music is little weird. The theme, strangely written by Bono and The Edge, but performed by Tina Turner is fine, but apparently the production was somewhat disjointed, and the score reflects nothing of the melodies introduced in the theme. And then there is that score. Oh, man, that score, though. Long gone is the sweeping dramatic scores of John Barry and in its place is an occasionally off-putting faux techno score from French composer that felt vaguely antiquated at the time of release. As much as the rest of the film is strong, the music throughout may be the weakest throughout any of the 50-year-plus history of the series. I’ve often thought that a good score can make a film—for instance, Halloween (1978) borders on unwatchable with John Carpenter’s music—and one wonders if this could have been one of the absolute greatest in the series if John Barry could have been persuaded to return.

The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, the stuntman for Anthony Hopkins (who I think we can all agree deserves a lot more credit than he’s gotten so far)

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: I like it a lot. Had it not been followed by one of the most indifferent sequels in history with The Legend of Zorro (2005), it might be remembered as a more seminal film today.

Anthony Hopkins might not be just a great actor, but also one of the more underrated movie stars in the history of cinema. Sure, he can play Hannibal Lecter and various near-Hannibals with aplomb, but the fact that such a pointedly English actor could convincingly the wit and swashbuckling bravura of Mexican California’s greatest hero. Antonio Banderas as his heir presumptive is pretty intuitive, but the star of Remains of the Day (1993)? On spec, I don’t see it, and yet, he delivers. He delivers so well that the movie lives and dies by his presence. Just see the aforementioned Legend to see how such a film without Hopkins can only generate a lifeless quality.

And yet, while he is the strongest link in the chain, there is one part of the conceit of Hopkins-as-Zorro that takes one out of the movie. At the time of filming in 1997, Hopkins was already 60. It’s pretty clear in the early goings—when Diego’s Zorro is repelling the Spanish oppressors— that he isn’t doing his own stunts.

It’s a minor quibble in movie that works by its own standards. The plot actually tracks for the most part. The bad guys are dastardly. The good guys play out their revenges in a gallant sort of way. The action is all of the firey explosion and clanging saber variety, with nary a pixel of computer generated imagery.  Which also puts it in that rare breed of films that ages in such a way that—without further context—you wouldn’t necessarily guess when it was made*. What more can really be expected of a movie?

* Unless of course you count the obligatory love ballad over a James Horner melody that places it firmly in the shadow of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), but that is only over the end credits, and should hardly count against the film as a whole.