There may be some people who haven’t found this summer disappointing, film-wise, so far. I expect that they will yawn at The Mask of Zorro. For myself, it’s the best thing yet to come down the pike.

Hopefully, everybody here is familiar with this guy, who was one of the earliest of the masked heroes, predating even The Lone Ranger. Zorro (“The Fox”) debuted in All-Story Weekly in August, 1919, as “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley, who continued to turn out Zorro stories for the next forty years. Cinematically, the touchstone Zorro — up to now — has to be Tyrone Power from The Mark of Zorro, which I hope everyone here has seen — and taped. Guy Williams’ Disney Zorro, however, made me yawn.

I presume everybody knows the basic story. Don Diego Vega returns from Spain to his family’s hacienda in California early in the 19th century, and finds everybody being ground down by the evil royal governor (or a minion named Basil Rathbone, as in the Power movie). Vega decides to play a dual role: the foppish Don Diego, whose idea of exercise is sniffing at his handkerchief; and the masked, caped and super-athletic Zorro, defender of the poor and oppressed.

In the current story, we find Mexico rebelling against Spain and California’s royal governor, the evil Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson), Zorro’s arch-enemy and rival in love of old, about to be expelled by the armies of Santa Ana. But Rafael wants one more blow at Zorro, and just before leaving arranges to execute three total innocents in the hope of drawing out Zorro. Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) does appear, and with the help of two young boys, the Murietta brothers, defeats Montero and escapes unharmed. Well, almost unharmed. And Montero has one more string to his bow, one that will destroy Zorro and everybody he loves …

Twenty years later (so it says: but internal evidence in the film would suggest more like 25 years) everybody pops up again. The Murietta brothers are wandering around Old California, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, in the company of a gringo named Three-Finger Jack (L. Q. Jones). In a perhaps apocryphal variant of a celebrated historical event, the better-known brother, Joaquin (Victor Rivers), is killed by a villainous turncoat U.S. Cavalry officer named Harrison Love (Matthew Letscher) and Jack is captured, while the less well-known brother, Alejandro (Antonio Banderas), makes good his escape. At about the same time, Montero returns to California with his daughter Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to implement a plan to split Alta California off from Mexico, while a now aged Don Diego Vega — Zorro’s real identity — also pops up like a bad penny. Vega is a bit too old to engage in old-fashioned swordplay at the level he used to, so — to help stop Montero and right a few old wrongs — he drafts Alejandro and teaches him a number of things, of which fencing is perhaps the least important. Alejandro eventually manages to subordinate his need for revenge to the other needs of the Californios. Fortunately, the two needs turn out to run together…

The whole film was great fun, all 2+ hours of it. There are a few hommages to the Tyrone Power film (see Elena’s great confessional scene). There are some great fight scenes — see where Alejandro tries to steal a horse from the stables in the back of a barracks (I never realized it was so difficult to jump from a roof directly into the saddle of a horse — I guess it requires a very well-trained horse). There is Spanish dancing. There is Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose hair is unfortunately overlong (if you wonder what I mean by this, see the big fencing scene with Elena and Zorro — if she had a decent haircut, the movie could have had a decent R-rating instead of a piffling PG-13). There is a musical score by James Horner, pretending to be Alfred Newman (Captain from Castile); you can’t go wrong with Horner (Battle Beyond the Stars, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Titanic, to name only a few). There are even — it is, after all, the summer season — a couple of nifty explosions almost worthy of Independence Day. No spacecraft, however.

The ending is such that there is no need for a sequel. But I’d give odds that there will be one — and I, for one, look forward to it.