Zorro Makes His Mark By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 17, 1998

Antonio Banderas hides behind "The Mask of Zorro." (Sony) Director: Martin Campbell Cast: Antonio Banderas; Anthony Hopkins; Catherine Zeta Jones; Stuart Wilson; Matthew Letscher; Maury Chaykin Running Time: 2 hours, 16 minutes For mild violence and sexual innuendo

And that's the girl!

This would be the big news in the film: Catherine Zeta-Jones, instant star, the new Rita Hayworth, as in, yes, I say again, yes yes yesyesyes. Zeta-Jones plays – well, the plot is somewhat garbled, as if modeled on a piece of wrought iron from the balconies of Barcelona – but let us just say, she's the girl. Zorro likes her. The Spanish governor Montero likes her. Zorro's mentor likes her, because he used to be Zorro and he is in fact her papa. The American mercenary renegade likes her. The peasants like her. I like her. Everybody likes her. There's something about Elena.

As for the rest of the thing, it can be summed up as follows: I went to a sword fight the other night, and a movie broke out.

"The Mask of Zorro" is entertaining without being exhilarating. It's fun at about 62 percent of the level that the old Errol Flynn swashbucklers hit in the late '30s. As Zorro movies go, it's pretty good. As movies go, it's a little bit better than okay.

Zorro, which means "fox" in Spanish, has been around since a crime reporter with a lurid imagination and a leaden pen made him up in 1919. Usually played by grinning gringos of the Tom Dewey-mustache variety, like a Fairbanks, a Power or a Guy Williams, he is here played by a gentleman for the first time both authentically Hispanic and authentically mustache-less, Antonio Banderas.

The accent, therefore, may be accurate but the moves are nevertheless predictable, though to be fair, they still enchant. Zorro, after all, is the original man in black as well as the original masked man, and Banderas gets all the moves right; more important, he looks good in tight pants. I also like a man with a graduate level degree in bullwhip gymnastics and improvised field evacuation techniques. He finds the usual astonishing number of trees, flagpoles, castle battlements and, oh yes, flagpoles, to snap that lash around and then zip himself out of trouble as though he's got one of those James Bond space rocket dealies on his back.

Plot? A lot. In fact, too much. It seems stolen from one of the lost episodes of "The Wild, Wild West," the old western that tried to stick secret agent conspiracy shenanigans in among the sagebrush and the arroyos. As "Mask" has it, the old Zorro – Anthony Hopkins, bringing Hamlet's moody gravitas to a movie that in no other way deserves or matches it – escapes from prison after 20 years growing a beard and nurturing a steely glare. Evil despotism having returned to old California, he recruits a new Zorro, a young thief, to wage war on a Spanish governor who is enslaving peasants to mine the gold from El Dorado to buy California from Mexico (it's roughly 1841); the movie could also be called "Indiana Zorro and the Lost Gold Mine." There's even a beachboy-looking blond American named "Love" (Matt Letscher) around to bedevil everyone and die of close encounters of the sword kind.

Stuart Wilson, who specializes in villainy (as in "Lethal Weapon 3"), plays the vicious, hypocritical Governor Montero. He seems to get these parts when other, more charismatic actors turn them down. What a nasty Montero Basil Rathbone would have made; what a nasty one Sean Bean or Steven Berkoff would make. But Wilson's chap is dour, bland, grouchy, unmemorable, a serious flaw in the movie's melodramatic calculations.

"The Mask of Zorro" really strikes sparks only twice; once is a dance scene between those hot-blooded kids, Banderas and Zeta-Jones, and another is an erotically charged duel scene, in which they cross blades, wills and, ultimately, tongues. He's great; she's fabulous. Watch her face light up with passion and exhilaration and pure alpha-being joy. Watch her quickness. Watch her beauty.

Finally, watch her career. It's probably the fastest moving flying object in the summer skies. In this version of the film, the letter Z again takes on huge significance – but it's the Z that stands for Zeta-Jones.