As for my own candidate…
Maybe 2005’s The Legend of Zorro wasn’t the WORST immediate sequel (if, indeed, eight years after The Mask of Zorro counts as “immediate”). But it was a drop-off. Mainly, because the main engine driving the plot was rather unbelievable as well as historically inaccurate. I mean, there’s “suspension of disbelief” and there’s “instant divorce in a heavily Catholic region in the nineteenth century.”
My tendency to script-doctor kicks in with this one…the movie would have been better, perhaps even lived up to the original, if they’d pulled a Vertigo and had the Pinkerton agents blackmail Elena into faking her death and impersonating someone else. That would have afforded us some drama as a grieving Alejandro struggles to hold on for his young son’s sake, and, after seeing this new woman in town who so resembles Elena, fears he is going mad from grief in believing it’s really her. And it would have given us a hell of a scene when Alejandro, after finding out the truth, confronts the Pinkerton agents who are behind the scheme…
“Why Elena? Any other woman would have served your purpose just as well. Some Don’s patriotic daughter, or some widow, or, hell, you could have trained a whore from the brothel to impersonate an aristocrat. Instead, you settle on a devoted wife and mother and blackmail her with her husband’s safety. You force her to fake her death with no guarantee she could go back to her old life afterwards…or even that she’d survive this at all. You put her through hell. You put me through hell. You put HER EIGHT-YEAR-OLD SON THROUGH HELL!!! If there’s a shred of humanity left in either of you, you will tell me why you did this!”
One of the agents replies, “Because no other woman–no Don’s daughter or widow or whore–had the inside information on your society that your wife already did. And it would have taken time to train another operative–time we didn’t have. By the time we would have had any other operative ready, it may well have been too late for this country.”
“Congratulations,” Alejandro sneers. “You thought of everything.”
The agent glowers. “It’s easy for you to judge us, isn’t it, Don de la Vega? You charge in on your stallion and wave your sword and the public hails you as a hero. As they should. You do, after all, save lives. Our work saves lives too…but no one hails us as heroes. We work in the shadows because we have to…because we have to make the dirty decisions that the public doesn’t know about and doesn’t want to know about because they don’t want to believe these decisions are necessary. The kind of decisions where we may have to allow five innocent people to die so that five thousand innocent people can live. That’s the truth of our work. That’s what we have to do and will continue to do. But don’t think for a minute, if I do have to let five innocent people die, that I am not haunted by those five every day of my life. Whether the good I try to do outweighs any evil I have to allow…I’ll find that out on my day of judgment.”
