I Love The Mask of Zorro

You know I love Zorro.

Like really long stretches will go without me getting my Zorro fix and then I'll sit down and watch Mask and go.

"Oh my God that was the greatest movie I've ever seen in my life."

Part of what makes me think it's great is that it is a movie movie. From top to bottom everything about it screams that it's a story designed to please a crowd rather than a representation of reality. It knows what it is and is one of the best god damn versions of what it's trying to be.

Almost every frame of that movie is about re-enforcing that. Nothing in that movie happens that doesn't make the story better.

And what's all the more interesting is that in that time and in that place they didn't make movies like that or at least hadn't in a long time.

Zorro is a lark. And nobody was doing larks anymore.

It was the 90's. Goofball corn was for kids.

Which brings me to what I want to right about that opening and it's role in the movie.



The movie introduces Alejandro, our eventual hero, as basically an excited kid watching a big budget version of old school Disney Zorro.  Now that's one step to telling the audience what's up  but the real kicker is that he's ultimately our main character. The movie takes you by the hand and goes. "It's okay. I know you think this is cool and I'm not going to suddenly call you stupid or childish for it because I do to. We're all in on this. We're all around the fire. So let's have some fun."

It invites the most jaded of us to sit down and enjoy the Spanish Fox for the old school pulp hero he is.

It even literalizes that as Alejandro's entire arc. Can this scruffy scoundrel find it in him to be El Zorro, the classic hero.