The Legend of Zorro (2005)

The Legend of Zorro arrives eleven years after the original as a sequel nobody demanded and conducts itself with the weary professionalism of a hired carriage. Antonio Banderas returns as the Californio hero, swishing and grinning through a plot about a secret society of European aristocrats scheming to sell nitroglycerin to the Confederate army. The cast is overwhelmingly Hispanic, which in 2005 reflected a story set in Mexican California instead of a studio directive. Catherine Zeta-Jones gives Elena genuine agency: she spies, she fights, she throws a man off a moving train. Her independence sits inside a marriage-crisis plot, so it plays as sturdy adventure screenwriting rather than a statement of principle.

Where the film might have sermonized, it declines. The villain is a count, an aristocrat nursing a grudge against the American experiment, which is not the same as a critique of capital. No climate anxiety intrudes on the vineyard. Nobody lectures about bodies, about neurology, about the constructed nature of the historical record. The Knights of Aragon are a pulp invention, not a revisionist argument about who really won the West, and the treatment of California statehood carries only faint ethnic texture. The Confederates are villains because they are Confederates, a position available to any studio since 1865.

The result is a film with modest cultural fingerprints and no agenda to speak of. It gestures toward Latino representation by the simple act of existing in its own setting. It gives its heroine a sword. Then it settles into domestic reconciliation and rides off. Critics mauled it, audiences shrugged at an A minus, and the whole enterprise has the mild, inoffensive character of a heritage tourism brochure with better stunts. We have classified stranger vintages, but rarely ones this forgettable.