With the ambitions of the characters so resolutely set at cross purposes, there is plenty of dramatic conflict to carry the story through to the end, which involves parallel, score-settling sword fights between longstanding enemies Don Diego and Montero, and between Alejandro and a blond American officer (Matt Letscher) who has bedeviled Zorro all along the way. In the process, of course, the spirited Alejandro strikes high-flying sparks with Elena. Eventually shaping up and acquiring the requisite fighting skill and flair, Alejandro makes his debut as the reincarnation of Zorro 45 minutes into the picture, and shortly worms his way into Montero’s inner circle posing as a wealthy don sympathetic to his treacherous plan of estab-lishing an independent Republic of California.
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Now old, gray and vengeance-minded, Don Diego is on the point of assassinating Montero when he spots Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), now a ravishingly beautiful woman who has been raised believing that Montero is her father.Įlena’s presence complicates Don Diego’s plans for how to deal with Montero, and in due course he recruits an outlaw, Alejandro Murrieta (Banderas), who happens to be the survivor among the two brothers who helped him years ago, and teaches him everything he knows. Twenty years later, Montero is back with a devious scheme to buy the California territory from Santa Ana with gold he is illicitly mining on Mexican land. But Montero, not about to leave without exacting revenge against the man who has caused him so much trouble, invades Don Diego’s hacienda, causes Esperanza to be killed, kidnaps Elena and throws Don Diego into a dungeon to ponder what he has lost. With the battle against Spain now won, Don Diego resolves to hang up his mask and devote himself to his wife, Esperanza, and baby daughter, Elena. Zorro, it turns out, is the aristocratic Don Diego de la Vega (Anthony Hopkins). Helped at a crucial moment by twin boys, Zorro spectacularly rescues three peasants about to be executed by the outgoing Spanish governor, Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson). It’s 1821, and the rebellion that Santa Ana is leading against colonial Spanish rule in Mexico has spread north to Alta California. After an intro that has the black-caped, masked and sombreroed Zorro stride into frame a la James Bond and etch his signature “Z” onto the screen with his sword, 18-minute prologue deftly establishes the reasons for the character’s heroic stature and sets in motion the dramatic gears that will power the remainder of the action. Pic favors dashing adventure, dramatic and political intrigue, well-motivated characters and romance between mightily attractive leads over fashionable cynicism, cheap gags, over-stressed contemporary relevance and sensation for sensation’s sake.
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Zorro’s star has waned since that time, but Antonio Banderas should go a long way toward changing that.
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Character of the mysterious Robin Hood/Scarlet Pimpernel figure who fights aristocratic oppressors in Old California was a household name from the time of his creation by police reporter and pulp fiction writer John-ston McCulley in 1919, and the appearance the next year of the silent film “ The Mark of Zorro,” with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., through the late ’50s, when Guy Williams starred in the enormously popular Disney TV series.