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.