Zorro Rides Again: A dusty, chaotic Saturday morning marathon

Is it worth the watch?

If you have a soft spot for 1930s serials where the plot resets every ten minutes, sure. It’s perfect if you want to turn your brain off and watch men in cowboy hats fall off cliffs repeatedly. If you need logic, actual character arcs, or high production value, you’re going to be frustrated by the second chapter. It feels a bit like The Tunnel in its pacing—relentless, but not always for the right reasons.

John Carroll as James Vega is a weird choice for a masked hero. He spends half the time looking like he’s trying to remember where he left his car keys. Then he puts on the mask and suddenly he’s doing backflips over crates of dynamite. It’s genuinely funny how much the stunt doubles look absolutely nothing like him. One second it’s Carroll, the next it’s a guy who is four inches shorter and built like a barrel. You really have to admire the lack of shame here.

The "Terrorists"

The villains are just generic guys in suits who hang out in dusty offices planning to blow up trains. They don’t have much motivation beyond "we want the railroad to fail." It’s not exactly Human Passions in terms of depth. Every time they talk, they sound like they’re reading from a script that was written on the back of a napkin five minutes before filming.

• The sound effects for the gunfights are just aggressive popping noises.
• I’m pretty sure they used the same two horses for every single chase scene.
• The mask is clearly just a piece of felt with eye holes.

There’s this one scene where a bridge is supposed to blow up, and the pyrotechnics guy clearly just lit a box of matches near a miniature model. It’s adorable. It reminded me of some of the low-fi stuff in Big Moments from Little Pictures, where the scale is all wrong but the enthusiasm is there. The movie doesn't care about physics. If a guy needs to escape, he just jumps. Gravity is more of a suggestion than a law in these parts.

Is it good? Not really. But it’s got this weird, jerky rhythm that keeps you awake. It’s like eating a bag of cheap candy—you know it’s bad for you, but you can’t stop until the bag is empty. Just don’t go in expecting a masterpiece. It’s pure, unfiltered Saturday afternoon fluff. 🐎