The Legend of Zorro

The Legend of Zorro, I am happy to report, is truly the stuff of which legends are made - terrible, dark legends that haunt the dreams of children, legends which come to life with enormous fangs and black secrets, legends of doom! In short, it is lengendarily bad. So unbelievably awful that it is, in fact, really great. I have rarely laughed so hard: the accents alone are worth it.

I always have trouble with movies that are supposed to be about people for whom English is not a first language, yet who persist in speaking English to one another, and not just any English, either. No. They speak grammatically correct, idiomatic English with peculiar, hideous, mutating accents. In Zorro, the majority of the characters are supposed to be Hispanic. Therefore, you would think that they would speak Spanish when alone with each other. Alas, you would be wrong. Apparently Spanish dialects in 1850 were so widely diverse that they could only understand each other in English, and no doubt it's that difference in dialects that makes their accents so hilariously widely divergent. So divergent that there is no way, no way on the planet that any of them have the same native tongue. And the evil French count's accent? Wow. It goes from mangled French to mangled Irish to mangled Spanish - I laughed, I cried.

And then, just when the movie couldn't get any funnier, there were mysterious explosions. We thought that probably the Martians had landed to add their accents to the mix. That would have been perfect. So, so perfect. If they ever make another Zorro movie, and they should, oh they should, then they must have Martians. Only Martians could make this movie better.