For the week of May 4th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the masterful action-adventure The Mask of Zorro to Blu-ray. When all is said and done, director Martin Campbell will probably go down as the man who reinvented James Bond twice: he introduced folks to both the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig iterations of the character. But as culturally significant as GoldenEye and Casino Royale are, I doubt he'll ever make a better, more enjoyable film than The Mask of Zorro. It's the best kind of entertainment - square, charming, and surprisingly funny - and every time I watch it, I marvel at everything Campbell achieves. In many ways, this plays like a programmer from the 1940s with a blockbuster budget; that's how nimbly it negotiates genres and tones. It opens like a Hollywood melodrama, with Anthony Hopkins' Don Diego de la Vega living a double life (nobleman by day; masked avenger by night) until Stuart Wilson's sneering villain shows up to destroy his family and imprison him for life. We could be watching a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, and we'd be happy to keep going, so good are Hopkins and Wilson (the whitewashing of their casting aside), but then Zorro pivots, offering a spin on Aladdin, of all things (and I don't think this connection is an accident: Zorro screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio also penned that 1992 classic), as Antonio Banderas' bumbling thief becomes De la Vega's unlikely disciple. Even more than Desperado, The Mask of Zorro established what an electrifying leading man Banderas could be - he's sufficiently dashing when he assumes the Zorro mantle, but he's just as engaging when he's verbally sparring in drunken reprobate mode with Hopkins. The two give the film the flavor of a great buddy picture...only for Catherine Zeta Jones to pretty much walk away with the movie when she strides in as De la Vega's long-estranged daughter. It's a hell of a debut: she comes across like some singular melding of Katharine Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Olivia De Havilland. Rare is the romantic subplot that elevates an other otherwise propulsive actioner, but that's just how good Banderas and Jones are. All that, and the movie still has time to turn into a proto-Bond movie during the delirious third-act extravaganza. You never see this movie break a sweat. I could watch it once a month.
I think I'd be more irritated with Vin Diesel's Bloodshot, which arrives courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, if I'd paid to see it in a movie theater. The film, which introduces theaters to the nigh-unkillable Valiant Comics superhero with nanites in his bloodstream, feels like it exists simply to keep Diesel's face on bus stops in between Fast & Furious movies (to paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton). Despite a nifty twist at the midpoint, the film puts so little effort into franchise-building that you wonder if anyone was all that enthusiastic about making it; they even largely jettison the character's goofily compelling black-and-white aesthetic because, presumably, Diesel didn't want to look that silly (the biggest nod we get to how Bloodshot appears in the comics occurs when Diesel orchestrates a battle - and this is 100% true - in a flour cloud). But with cinemas now largely shuttered, the modest confines of the home theater prove somewhat liberating to an otherwise unambitious programmer like Bloodshot. No longer does it seem as slight or undercooked. I found myself enjoying its formula, like the way it grafts a revenge thriller (Bloodshot rises to action to avenge his wife's murder) to a Hollywood blockbuster (as with the Fasts, he ends up cobbling together a de facto family that include Lamorne Morris' quirky hacker and Eiza Gonzalez's ludicrously gorgeous sidekick), or how cheerfully it pilfers from other, more distinctive movies. I counted The Matrix, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Reservoir Dogs, and a bit of Iron Man 3, especially in terms of one shared cast member's role in both films. Normally I might take the film to task for being too derivative; now, I see in all these pre-fab elements as what the French call an homage. Credit, too, for how well Bloodshot handles its twist - the reveal itself is good, but even better is how the movie uses it to rib its own shameless devotion to clichés. And if Diesel seems like a huge star on a movie screen, then he's practically Godzilla on your average TV. His presence would elevate Bloodshot in even the most uninspired of situations: you watch him growling threats at his corporate handlers or melting down as Toby Kebbell's dancing psychopath menaces his wife (Talulah Riley), and you're reminded of the kind of diamond-hard charisma guys like Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin brought to the Silver Screen. You'd follow Diesel anywhere, from TV to the cinemas, and beyond.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes a 4K upgrade of the fantasy-adventure 47 Ronin. 47 Ronin has this reputation as a legendary bomb (and not without reason: any movie that finishes production in 2011 only to get a timid release in 2013 after almost eighteen months of cost-heavy reshoots and reedits, many of which happened without any input from director Carl Rinsch, will carry the stink of fish on it), but despite all the signs of post-production meddling (setpieces hacked to the bone; major characters appearing/disappearing at random; Bushido Culture for Morons narration pasted to the beginning and end of the film), the end result still works as a sturdy action programmer. Chris Morgan's script wisely retains most of the bones of the original 47 Ronin legend so that even with his magical filigrees (a whole horde of supernatural monsters and beings), we have a sturdy structure that sweeps us along. After an evil witch (Rinko Kikuchi) and a power-mad lord (Tadanobu Asano) conspire against Lord Asano (Min Tanaka), Asano's forty-seven disgraced samurai warriors (led by Hiroyuki Sanada and Keanu Reeves) mount a daring revenge mission to restore their honor. As you might guess with a movie that clocks in at around two hours, we don't get near enough time with most of the forty-seven, but Morgan concocts a satisfying fix. For much of its runtime, this is a mismatched buddy movie between Sanada and Reeves. You've seen this relationship before, sure. Sanada's Oishi is a principled leader who initially shuns Reeves' half-English orphan Kai, yet as Kai proves his mettle, the two men forge a bond of respect and trust. Still, Morgan sketches their growing admiration with Michael Mann-esque understatement. Better still, compared to something like The Great Wall, 47 Ronin doesn't feel like a craven attempt to co-opt Japanese culture for American audiences. I'm impressed that it preserves the mass-suicide ending, and that it foregrounds moments of honor and tradition over battle sequences. What holds the film back more than anything is the direction. Carl Rinsch's style here is aggressively functional. For a movie that has magical beings and massive battle sequences and a huge cast of characters and locations, Rinsch shoots it in this too-plodding, straightforward style. The film would be 50%-to-70% better if it had a stronger vision backing the images/story. I knew Rinsch was the problem when I saw the credited DP. This movie looks like video-game cutscenes, but its cinematographer is the great John Mathieson, who lensed the gorgeous Gladiator / Kingdom of Heaven / Robin Hood trifecta. Mathieson doesn't deliver only if you don't know what to give him.
I don't think many Big Lebowski fans would argue if you called John Turturro's Jesus Quintana the breakout character. Still, Quintana only works when you use him as a garnish. Everything about the character is functionally insane - his attire, his bowling fetish, his accent, his criminal record, his catchphrases - and when he's used in small doses, we don't have to reconcile his fundamental unreality with the rest of the Lebowski universe. The last thing you'd want is to make a Jesus Quintana movie...which is why I'm still scratching my head at The Jesus Rolls, the Jesus-starring follow-up to Lebowski. That might be overstating the Lebowski connection a bit. Other than the character himself, The Jesus Rolls has nothing to do with that 1998 cult classic; by all accounts, the Coens gave Turturro their permission to use Jesus, thus ending their involvement with this ugly, unpleasant, and largely pointless "comedy." From minute one, you understand why Jesus doesn't work as a lead. We can't have a child molester for a hero, and so The Jesus Rolls retcons his lurid backstory ("He's a sex offender! With a record! He served six months in Chino for exposing himself to an eight-year-old") into an idiotic misunderstanding that doesn't square with what we know of the character. But as writer/director, Turturro is less interested in honoring Lebowski than he is in constructing a bizarre vanity project for himself. His Quintana might be an ex-con and a criminal, but he's also an inveterate ladies man who does improbably well with the opposite sex. What does this mean? If you ever wanted to see Jesus simulate sex with an overqualified supporting cast, your wish has been granted, I guess. As strange as it is that Turturro presents Jesus in this light, it's weirder still that he's actually making a remake, of sorts. In its broad strokes, the film resembles Bertrand Blier's 1974 sex comedy Going Places, swapping out Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere's horny ruffians for Quintana and Bobby Cannavale's even dumber sidekick. The two swing their way through upstate New York, interacting with a bunch of Turturro's friends (I guess Susan Sarandon, Audrey Tautou, J.B. Smoove, Pete Davidson, Jon Hamm, Christopher Walken, and Tim Blake Nelson all owed Turturro favors), and then kinda just grinds to a halt. The Jesus Rolls is short - I can at least give it that. But that doesn't make it any less of a waste of time.