Film / The Legend of Zorro

"It seems we have a fly in the ointment... or should I say a fox? Zorro."

— Jacob McGivens

The Legend of Zorro is a 2005 swashbuckler film and the sequel to The Mask of Zorro. Like the first, it was directed by Martin Campbell and stars Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Ten years after the last film's events, the demands on Zorro are putting a strain on Alejandro and Elena's marriage, so they have a temporary trial separation. Meanwhile, a new Smug Snake (Rufus Sewell) has entered the scene with eyes on both Elena and California, whose impending statehood is imperiled when Alejandro uncovers yet another conspiracy to carve the state and hand it over to various baddies. Cue a desperate battle on multiple fronts to win the day and the girl.

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This sequel has examples of:

• Ancient Conspiracy: The Knights of Aragon. According to Padre Felipe, they ruled Europe from the shadows for many centuries. Now they're plotting to cause a civil war in the USA to prevent it becoming a rival to their power.
• Animal Reaction Shot: Zorro manages to land his horse on top of a moving carriage train, only to notice that it's about to enter a tunnel. There's a shot of the horse's eyes widening.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Some of the most glaring ones in the film, which is set in 1850, are the role of the Confederate States of America (which weren't formed until 1861), the First Transcontinental Railroad (which wasn't completed until 1869; in fact, California wouldn't gain its first railroad until 1856) and the California Statehood Referendum which is entirely fictitious. On top of that, Abraham Lincoln, who is shown welcoming California into the Union, never traveled to the state, as president or otherwise.
  • In 1850s California, it would be almost impossible for an upper class woman like Elena to divorce her husband and raise her children alone without her social standing ruined. Doubly so for a state which then still retained Mexican Catholic culture, where divorce remains prohibited in canon law without special dispensation.
• Asshole Victim: What happens to the two Pinkerton agents eventually. They weren't proper villains and at their most antagonistic, they were merely obstructive Inspector Javert characters who saw no need for Zorro and had their own ideas on how to save the country. But after blackmailing Elena into divorcing Alejandro or else they'd release Zorro's identity to all his enemies and drive Zorro's life into the mud, they had built up enough Hate Sink characteristics that nobody can really hate Count Armand all that much when he finally kills the two Pinkerton agents off, despite being a Hate Sink character himself who smugly treats Alejandro with disdain and tries to woo Elena openly in front of him.
• Badass Bystander: The Cortez couple seem to be set up to be another pair of helpless victims in need of rescuing. Turns out they're quite capable of putting up a fight when pushed to it.
• Badass Family: Not only we have the current Zorro Alejandro, but his (ex-)wife Elena, a reluctant spy of Pinkerton agents, hasn't lost her passionate Action Girlhood to motherhood, and their son Joaquin can also sneak around and hold his own against adults. In the climax, they all team up to stop the Big Bad from using a train filled with explosives to cause the United States of America to tear itself apart. The family also has from the previous film Elena's late father Don Diego de la Vega, the previous Zorro, and Joaquín Murrieta, Alejandro's late brother who wasn't a slouch either.
• Badass Preacher: Padre Felipe. A scrawny-looking, unassuming priest who punches out mooks (and who braves bullets to conceal Zorro's identity)? That approaches even Zorro's level of badass.
• Bald of Evil: Armand's Battle Butler doesn't have a hair on his head.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Elena runs across a dirt field at full speed, fights with a shovel, runs back across the same field at full speed, falls in the dirt at least once, and when she gets back to her room her white nightgown is spotless and she doesn't have a hair out of place.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Elena and Alejandro, in varying proportions, for most of the film. But especially the first time they meet after Alejandro learns that Elena has been working for the Pinkertons, when they get in a fiery argument that ends like this:
  Elena: When I said we were never meant to be together... I meant it.
  Alejandro: Finally, we agree on something!
  [they kiss passionately]
• Big Bad: Armand is the mastermind of the entire plot.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: While it's also an Even Evil Has Standards moment where Count Armand shows himself to have a tiny bit of morality by not executing Zorro on the spot in front of his wife and son, his decision to not immediately kill his foe and to just ride off on his train with Elena and Joaquin ends about as well for him as you'd expect, with Zorro escaping death and coming right for him immediately afterwards.
• Butt-Monkey: McGivens only exists to get hurt and humiliated. He lost all his teeth just in the first reel. Even his death is undignified.
• Clark Kenting: Alejandro was so good at playing the Upper-Class Twit that he had his own son Joaquin fooled.
• Corporal Punishment: Joaquin's teacher is strict, and resorts to punishing unruly students with a cane to maintain discipline, leading to a mock-Sword Fight with the boy.
• Culture Clash: The film has elements of this, contrasting the Hispanic trappings of the old California to the increasingly Wild West aesthetic of the to-be-American state.
• Death by Looking Up: McGivens ends up defeated, with his head right below a nitroglycerin container which is leaking a drop. Cue terrified look and scream.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: A heroic example occurs when Armand confronts Elena about the true reason she pretended to be falling for him.
  Elena: Did you actually think that I would be swept off my feet by a sadistic coward like you?
  Armand: I thought you were a woman of vision.
  Elena: Ah, vision. I could barely stomach the sight of you, Armand. The only way I could bear your touch was to imagine you were Alejandro.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child: Elena quizzes Alejandro on details of their son Joaquin's life to make a point that he's so busy being Zorro that he's being a poor father.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Elena marries a rich tycoon who creates weapons of mass destruction and hides them in wine bottles. 'Sounds a lot like a Notorious 1946 movie.
• The Dragon: McGivens is a bandit hired by Armand to act as muscle in his schemes.
• Dramatic Unmask: Zorro gets captured and unmasked by the bad guys, who also have his wife and child in tow. Elena already knows his identity as do the audience; the only important character it's a reveal for is his son.
• Drowning My Sorrows: What would YOU do if you lost your wife to a smarmy, rich French dude?
• Dual Wielding: Early into the train swordfight, Armand reveals his rapier actually separates into a matching pair (eliciting a "wow" from Zorro) and tries to overwhelm Zorro who is still using only one. Armand kicks Zorro's sword out of his hand, so that it gets stuck in the ceiling, and tries to skewer Zorro using both swords, but Zorro catches the blades with his cape and steal Armand's swords, using them to cut a "Z" in Armand's waistcoat. Not one to give up easily, Armand pulls Zorro's rapier back out of the ceiling and grabs yet another sword from the rack as he exits the passenger car, leading to some dual-on-dual fighting atop the wood car.
• Dunce Cap: The cap is seen in Joaquin's class, worn by a student who asked to go to the bathroom.
• Establishing Character Moment: Father Felipe gets a nice one when five minutes into the film, he's telling the man who just shot up a plaza to bugger off in no uncertain terms. While standing right in front of him, unarmed.
• Eternal Sexual Freedom: The film is set in mid-19th century California. The wealthy and socially prominent main characters (Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones) get divorced, and the woman continues to raise their son and is apparently still socially prominent. And remember that this is Spanish-Mexican California, a Catholic culture, where divorce was even more intolerable than in Protestant countries, although loopholes did of course exist.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Armand can be convinced not to execute a father in front of his son.
• Evil Counterpart: Jacob McGivens to Father Felipe. As McGivens himself puts it, "we're both men of God."

• Family-Unfriendly Death: Despite being rated PG (compared to the first film's PG-13 rating), Legend has a few violent deaths, including the film's villain being tied to the front of a train and having his body slam into debris on the tracks onscreen
• Flynning: As explained here by Matt Easton of Schola Gladiatoria, the swordplay of the final duel is classic Hollywood swashbuckling: exciting, but less than practical.
  • Wielding rapiers, Zorro and Armand both elect for Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship instead of relying on thrusts, which they only attempt a couple of times. Whenever one of them does thrust, they do it in a way that makes them vulnerable, since when Armand tries it inside the car Zorro captures both of his swords, and when Zorro tries a thrust on the side of the locomotive, Armand strikes it from his hand, leaving it to be crushed by the train's wheels.
  • Instead of closing the opponent's line of attack while advancing into distance to deliver a thrust, as a fencer is supposed to do, they spend a lot of time artfully swatting at each other's blades from out of distance, meaning that they aren't even getting close enough to hit each other. To be fair, a lot of this is hard to notice unless you slow the footage down because the film-makers make the characters look like they're at closer range through some clever Forced Perspective and fast-paced editing: you get a better idea of the actual distance whenever they circle around each other or attempt corps-a-corps, such as elbows or kicks that were out of distance but made to look like they connected.
  • Obvious kills are missed. Several times Zorro dodges a wild swing by Armand that ends up missing by a huge margin. On the side of the boiler, immediately after the explosion caused by Elena throwing Armand's henchman from the train, Armand considerately continues to give ground while Zorro is busy climbing over an obstacle, instead of skewering Zorro while his guard is down.
  • There's a Blade Lock where Zorro and Armand each use their empty hand to grab the other's sword arm, and they glower at each other while ineffectively pushing against each other for three seconds before Armand manages to throw Zorro on his back. A headbutt or a knee would have ended that quicker.
  • Rather egregiously, Zorro manages to knock Armand off the wood pile and into the cab of the engine, disarmed of his weapons. Zorro knocks Armand further back with a kick to the face, performed while hanging from the roof of the cab. Instead of dropping into the cab and finishing off his momentarily helpless opponent, Zorro inexplicably climbs back up on the roof and calmbers out onto the boiler, giving Armand an opportunity to pull himself together, grab a gun, and take a shot at Zorro.
• Gory Discretion Shot: When McGivens dies, we only hear the blast of nitroglycerin falling in his face.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Tornado even only accepts Alejandro's orders once he speaks in Spanish, and Zorro asks Joaquin to talk with him "en la lengua de nuestros padres" in an attempt to prevent Joaquin recognizing his voice.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Alejandro is insanely jealous of Elena and Count Armand's courtship of her.
• Hair-Trigger Explosive: The villains' plan involves a train full of nitroglycerine. To demonstrate one tosses a small drop onto the floor causing a huge explosion.
• Happily Married: Yeah, there was the separation phase, but that was mostly because Elena was blackmailed into it. For the most part, Alejandro and Elena are this.
• Hate Sink: McGivens seems to be written as unlikable as possible to justify his status as a Butt-Monkey. He's an ugly, racist, Jerkass who's willing to murder children and a priest despite claiming to be a man of god. Unlike Love from the previous film, he isn't even particularly menacing or dangerous, coming off as ineffectual and buffoonish.
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": Alejandro, in a drunken stupor after the humiliation at Count Armand's party, ranted about making Elena jealous so she'd go back to him.
  Alejandro: Nobody leaves my tequila worm dangling in the wind!
• I'll Take That as a Compliment: Elena says this in defiance to Armand when he says her stepfather would be ashamed that she's become "nothing more than a common woman devoted to a common man".
• It Belongs in a Museum: Two Pinkerton agents capture Zorro and claim that the days of vigilantes are over.
  Pinkerton agent: [showing Zorro his mask] This belongs in a museum. So do you.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Joaquin's teacher was pretty strict and willing to physically discipline his students (albeit failing at it with Joaquin). However, as soon as he sees McGivens and his gang when he was with his students, he immediately puts himself in front of his students, showing his willingness to protect them despite his harsh exterior.
• Just Train Wrong: The driver of the bad guy's train is hit by a piece of wood and falls against the throttle, shoving it forward and causing the train's speed and boiler pressure to dramatically increase. Pushing the throttle forward would actually close it, making the train slow down (and eventually stop) while a rise in speed would cause the boiler pressure to decrease.
• Kick the Dog: Basically what the Pinkerton agents did to Alejandro when they blackmailed Elena into divorcing him and made his life miserable. Suffice to say, nobody feels sorry for them when Alejandro finally gets his hands on the two. They don't live long afterwards, since Armand was on to them anyway.
• Kiss of Distraction: When Armand is about to offer Elena a wedding gift on his knees, she hastily kisses him to prevent him from noticing Alejandro who's hanging over them at the balcony.
• Lamarck Was Right: Don Alejandro de la Vega's son, Joaquin, seems to have inherited his father's taste for social justice and swordfighting skills despite the fact that he has no idea his father is actually Zorro.
• Large Ham: Zorro himself.
  Alejandro: No-one leaves my tequila worm dangling in the wind!
• The Legend of X: Of Zorro.
• Light Is Not Good: McGivens kills people because he believes he is doing God's work, and often quotes the Bible.
• Lighter and Softer: Overlapping with Denser and Wackier. The first movie was fairly serious, this one ramps up the comedic while trying to appeal more to children (including a big role for Joaquin).
• Loves My Alter Ego: Joaquin idolizes Zorro, but thinks his father is a loser, without realizing that they're both the same man.
• Meaningful Rename: Happens between movies to Alejandro Murrieta who has since adopted Don Diego's surname De la Vega. This may raise some questions due to Elena being a De la Vega by birth yet also Alejandro de la Vega's wife. A man taking the woman's surname in marriage would be very unusual for Hispanic culture at the time, to say the least. A tie-in sequel book for Mask of Zorro made years before Legend explained that Alejandro posed as "Del Castillo", the nobleman alias he uses in Mask, until he discovered that Don Diego had named Del Castillo his heir in his will, making him De la Vega. Elena officially was still known as Montero until she got married.
• Mood Whiplash: Alejandro goes from a drunk-yet-comical rant to shock after the explosion, which unbeknownst to him, is a test of a nitroglycerin bomb by the Big Bad Ensemble.
• Nitro Express: The hero and the villain have a swordfight on top of a train loaded with nitroglycerin.
• Of Course I Smoke: Elena gets rid of Armand so she can talk to Alejandro by asking him to buy her a pipe. Much later, after she and Armand have had dinner, a servant brings "her" pipe. Initially she says she needs her stomach to settle first, but when she needs an excuse to be out on the balcony, she's forced to light up.
  Armand: Are you all right?
  Elena: Fine.
  Armand: My God, you're turning green.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Elena reacts this way when she discovers that her messenger pigeon was cooked and served to her as dinner by Ferroq. Gets worse when she attempts leaving and finds the bodies of the Pinkertons.
  • Armand's reaction when he's tied to the cowcatcher of a train about to crash into a barrier. Did we mention the train is also full of nitroglycerin?
  • As mentioned above, McGivens when seeing death is imminent.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • At two points in the film Zorro disguises himself by just throwing on something to cover his black outfit and wearing a different hat with the brim pulled down low to hide his mask.
  • Zorro's son is unable to recognize his own father's face or voice, while talking to him, because part of Zorro's eyes are covered by his facemask, and Zorro insists on keeping Joaquin's gaze elsewhere.
• Passing the Torch: The alternate ending does this with the aging Alejandro and his now-adult son Joaquin. This was changed, though, in order to allow for more possible sequels with the same actors.
• Pet the Dog: When Alejandro is captured and unmasked in front of Joaquin, Armand is fully willing to execute Alejandro through Elena's begging (especially considering he puts two and two together and realizes Elena's romance with him has been a cover for her investigation for the Pinkerton agents), until she finally pleads for him not to do it in front of their son Joaquin.
• Pinkerton Detective: Pinkerton agents extort Elena, the wife of Zorro, to help them investigate a secret society trying to prevent the 1850 admission of California to the Union. Rather anachronistically, since the Pinkertons weren't formed until after that event.
• Pocket Protector: Padre Felipe appears to die from a shot, but then he comes back later and reveals that he was saved by his crucifix necklace.
  Zorro: Thank God, you're alive.
  Padre Felipe: [pulls out cross with bullet embedded in it] I already did.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: McGivens insults Alejandro for being "a mixed breed dressed like a white man."
• Prison Changes People: Played for laughs when Joaquin breaks Alejandro out of prison. A few guards come running, and Alejandro thrashes them in about five seconds flat. When a surprised Joaquin asks him where he learned that, he quips, "Prison changes a man, son."

• Racing the Train: A version of this happens when Alejandro's son does this with the horse, Tornado, is racing to catch up to the train.
• Red Right Hand: McGivens has a cross shaped scar and wooden teeth.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Both villains do this before they die.
• Share the Male Pain: When one of the mooks hurts his tender parts in the opening fight, Zorro winces in sympathy.
• Shout-Out: "This belongs in a museum...and so do you."
• Shovel Strike: Elena attempts to fend off some attackers with a shovel.
• Skip to the End: The remarriage has to be rushed because the Zorro Bell is ringing.
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: Zorro and Armand hardly do anything but cut with their rapiers. The few times they do try thrusting, it ends up working against them.
• Switch to English: Inverted. After the title character rescues his son from the Big Bad's gang, they start a conversation in English. Then Zorro cuts the conversation off and requests that they converse in "the language of our fathers", Spanish, seemingly as a way of keeping Joaquin from recognizing his voice. The rest of the conversation occurs in Spanish with English subtitles.
• Sword Fight: Most notably, the climactic fight of Zorro and Armand on the train loaded with nitroglycerin.
• Thrown from the Zeppelin: After the Ancient Conspiracy members hear Armand's evil plans, one disagrees. As a result, Armand demonstrates his secret weapon — nitroglycerin — by throwing a small bottle of it on him.
• Traintop Battle: At the climax of the film, Alejandro has to rescue his family from a moving train. He has to fight mooks on the roof of the train to get aboard, and his final fight with Armand also spends some time on top of the train.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: The final train carriage, containing Joaquin and Tornado, is uncoupled and left behind. Even though the rest of the train is vanishing over the horizon at full speed by the time they get out of the carriage, they are able to get ahead of it in time to do a plot-relevant thing.
• Underestimating Badassery: McGivens insults Count Armand, whose face flashes a scowl for a second before grabbing a knife and slamming his face against a wooden table. He then pointed the knife at the man's tongue.
  Count Armand: [in a state of Tranquil Fury] This dagger, Mr. McGivens... Jake... has been in my family for generations. If you ever talk to me like that again... I will cut out your tongue and I'll feed it to my dogs. Understood?
• Underside Ride: Joaquin trails the McGiven's gang by clinging to the underside of their wagon.
• Undressing the Unconscious: Alejandro is awakened by a maid in a hotel and is perplexed to find he's naked. She explains she had to remove his wet clothes since he went swimming at their fountain after he got drunk. Alejandro is visibly uncomfortable and covering himself with his hands as she explains since she's also obviously Eating the Eye Candy... until Padre Felipe walks in and sternly tells her he will be expecting her at confession.

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