"The Legend of Zorro" is far worse than anyone could have ever, ever expected. After seeing it, viewers will wish longingly for the two hours and ten minutes of wasted life back.
"Legend" stars Antonio Banderas as Don Alejandro de la Vega by day, Zorro by night. The movie begins with an intense chase that's only purpose seems to be to introduce the antagonist. How do we know he's the antagonist? Maybe it has something to do with the hideous scar covering one side of his face and his impressive set of wooden teeth. After Zorro performs a series of unreal flips, he somehow manages to use his hat to knock some guy off his horse, which in laymen's lingo is simply "un-frigging-believable." The movie goes downhill from here.
Before the chase can continue, Zorro has a difficult time getting his horse to move. After two commands in English, to which the horse chooses not to respond, Zorro is forced to give the command in Spanish. Immediately, the horse takes off while the audience giggles and groans with disgust. The first fifteen minutes of the movie feel more like an hour and a half.
Upon Zorro's return to his Bat Cave-esque mansion, his wife, Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), appears. Her supposedly "Spanish" accent appears to be a thinly disguised attempt to hide her contempt for the production. The couple has a heated yet awkwardly worded discussion about their future, and then Zorro storms off into the sunset, only to rear his horse into the air. It is possibly one of the worst cinematic moments in history.
Each scene in the movie is more clich?d than the last, and several would leave even the dumbest movie viewer shaking his head. Golden moments include the swordsman's horse jumping out of a burning building and saving a woman, her child and Zorro. Another gem is the attempted assassination of Zorro's friend, the priest. Although the bad guy with the wooden teeth and scar on his face naturally believes the holy man to be dead, it turns out the priest is saved by his rosary, which had functioned as some kind of bulletproof vest.
"Give me the courage, the strength to wear the mask a little longer. Give Zorro one last ride," Banderas later pleads to a higher power. However, by this point in the movie it's hard to think of anything more horrendous than watching Zorro wear the mask any longer. The show must not go on!
"The Legend of Zorro" may well be the worst movie ever created for human viewing. It is heinously bad, so unbearable that it's almost punitive in nature. What mentally stable human being would want to subject oneself to such torture?
A suggestion for anyone coerced into seeing this film: take a seat in the back of the theater so as not to cause a scene when it becomes necessary to vomit profusely.
