RED SONJA (2025) is not good

It's funny how movies change in your estimation depending on the time if your life and the state of the media landscape. For example, The Mask of Zorro came out when I was seven. When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty decent. Not incredible, just a fun distraction. Let me tell you that I know now- I was wrong.

That movie fucking rips. 

I promise we'll get to Red Sonja in a moment. 

It's kind of funny, both Sonja and Zorro technically came from the pulps (Sonya, with a "y," from Magic Carpet, and Zorro from All-Story) and these two films are continuations of those legacies. 

The Mask of Zorro really goes for it in ways that we don't see today, even from the very beginning. Zorro, silhouetted by light and fog, carves and flaming Z into the air followed by a wildcat roar and flame explosion into the title. That's tight as shit. Modern films seem pretty afraid to do anything that's pure iconography like that (remember when Batman films ended with Batman running directly toward the camera with the batsignal behind him?). The movie was originally set to be directed by Robert Rodriguez before it passed to Martin Campbell, director of Goldeneye and eventually Casino Royale, and Campbell's clearly doing a successful Rodriguez pastiche. He's not usually the most stylish filmmaker, more of a work-for-hire type of guy, but this movie is positively greased with style.

The action is classic adventure material. Sword fights, acrobatics, and western pistols are clanging and thundering throughout, pacing the film fantastically. One dude gets shot while flying through the air not once, but twice.

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One of the only complaints about millennials that I agree with is that a lot of "millennial writing" in films comes across as jokey, but not actually funny. It's that "He's right behind me, isn't he?" type of writing. And once again, I promise I'll get to to Red Sonja. The humor in this film is a little cartoonish, as Zorro stabs a solider in his ass or tries to jump onto his horse only to have it move out of the way at the last second. But it all works, eliciting smiles all the way through. Antonio Banderas should be more rightfully remembered for his solid comedic timing and not just for his dashing good looks. 

The most integral piece to the whole thing might be the heart of the film. Zorro fights corruption in the upper class, for the people, and this particular incarnation of Zorro is one of the common people. It's righteous and a total blast to see the rich pricks getting what's coming to them at the end of it. It makes sense when you learn that Steven Spielberg was an executive producer whole played a heavy hand in it. 

Shot in and around Mexico City, the whole film feels tactile and real, which doesn't sound like much of a compliment, but really is when many films shot today look like they were filmed in front of a green screen in a high school gym in Atlanta. It's beautifully atmospheric when lit torches lick the walls of haciendas and caves, and it's even delightfully grimy and dusty at times. It's something I never noticed before every blockbuster movie started feeling sterile.

Seriously, for the longest time, I thought of The Mask of Zorro as just a fine movie. A seven out of ten, and I think that's similar to how most people have viewed it. But it's sharply risen in the last several years, and I now see it as a wildly entertaining movie. 

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Anyway, everything I spoke about positively above does not apply to Red Sonja. I decided to watch it after Molly Tanzer told me it was horrendous. She was right. Stiff, uncompelling, and completely derivative, this thing is a slog. The script is dead on arrival, the performances don't do anything to save the material, and everything looks like it was rendered on a PlayStation 3. And why's there an orc in the Hyborian Age?

Zorro's cool, though.