Eight years ago, The Mask of Zorro was one of the year's best surprises.

Thrilling, heartbreaking, witty, romantic and largely family-friendly, it was at once true to the spirit of the classic period actioners and also thoroughly of its own time.

With its PG rating, The Legend of Zorro is ostensibly even more family-friendly than the PG-13 original. Alas, that's just about the only category in which this belated sequel outdoes the classy original. Director Martin Campbell is back, along with returning stars Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones — though Anthony Hopkins as the original Zorro is sorely missed. And so are the thrills, wit and romance. After the high standard set by the original, The Legend of Zorro ranks among this year's biggest disappointments.

Ratings notwithstanding, is The Legend of Zorro really even more family-friendly than The Mask of Zorro? Certainly the filmmakers are courting family audiences in a new way this time around. If a horse burps, swigs wine, puffs on a pipe and even gets CGI-enhanced reaction shots in which his eyes widen at impending danger, it must be a family film.

The swordplay is even less deadly this time around, though characters are killed in other ways, notably involving nitroglycerin explosions. And certainly there's nothing like the original's gross-out scene with a decapitated head in a jar of water (though one bad guy watches wide-eyed as a drop of “nitro” falls toward his face; the actual explosion is mercifully off-screen).

Yet which of the four credited writers thought that family audiences — or anyone else — wanted to see the 10-year marriage of Zorro II (Banderas) and Mrs. Zorro (Zeta-Jones) on the rocks? Who thought we wanted to see Alejandro served with divorce papers just as he was about to go home and beg his wife's forgiveness? Was it meant to make matters better or worse that Elena divorced her husband only partly because she was angry at him, but also — unbeknownst to him — partly as a ruse enabling her to take up with an old flame from Spain (Rufus Sewell) in order to spy on him and discover his nefarious plans for California?

Didn't anyone have misgivings about the soirée scene in which a jealous Alejandro furiously chugs glass after glass of wine, then drunkenly brawls with Elena on the dance floor in a pathetic, cringe-inducing echo of the first film's sultry tango scene? Didn't anyone realize that we want the hero of a Zorro movie to be above this kind of loutish behavior?

It was different in The Mask of Zorro, where Alejandro's rough edges were offset by the grace and class of Hopkins's Diego de la Vega. Alejandro may have started out as a drunken lout, but Mask didn't ask us to accept him as a satisfactory Zorro until he had made a lot of progress from there. Whether it's plausible that Alejandro might slide back into his loutish behavior is beside the point — the point is that it's no fun.

What are Zorro and Mrs. Zorro fighting about in the first place? In their first scene together, Elena accuses Alejandro of caring more about being Zorro than about his own family, and not even knowing his own son. Are you tired yet?

You may be thinking about how The Incredibles, one of the best family films in years, covered similar territory. But Brad Bird's CGI heroes quarreled with far more humanity, depth, affection and nuance than Campbell's live-action cartoon characters. Elastigirl would never have threatened Mr. Incredible that if he walked out that door, he wasn't sleeping there tonight. And if for some reason she had gotten that mad at him, Mr. Incredible would never have walked out the door.

Although Alejandro and Elena each seem to think that the other is at least partly at fault, the filmmakers, as far as I can tell, seem basically to agree with Elena. Only Alejandro wrestles with self-doubt and weakness. Only he is rebuked by the priest, who tells him not to bother coming to confession until he goes back to Elena (reasonable advice, but why doesn't he say the same to Elena?). Only Alejandro is repeatedly humbled, from the drunken brawl at the soirée culminating in Elena slapping his face, to a crucial scene in which, held at knifepoint and forcibly stripped of his mask in front of his enemies and family, Alejandro solemnly tells Elena on his knees that “Family is my life.”

Cartoonish Charm

Yet by the end, without any evident change of heart, Elena is suddenly much more accepting of Alejandro's masked alter ego. “It's who we are,” she smiles, seeing him off to save the world with her blessing. Couldn't she have taken that line at the beginning of the film and saved all that trouble? Or are things different now because Alejandro finally has his priorities straight? What, specifically, is going to be different from now on? It's almost as if Alejandro doesn't really have to change, as long as he admits he was wrong.

What about Zorro's positive religious milieu? Here The Legend of Zorro is a mixed bag. In general, the Church is positively portrayed, with one priest in particular supporting the heroes against the villains to the point of heroism. Another less sympathetic priest is the butt of some silly Home Alone-style slapstick. The really dissonant religious element, though, is a nasty, racist villain with a cross-shaped scar carved in one cheek, who sneers constantly about “doing the Lord's work.” (By the way, in the end, Alejandro and Elena are remarried by a priest, which makes no sacramental sense.)

What about action? Here at least Legend manages to entertain, if not thrill. Mask of Zorro was thrilling because the action, while exaggerated, was more or less within the realm of what could really be done, if not necessarily by a real masked vigilante in actual combat situations, at least by skilled stand-ins in front of cameras in carefully rehearsed stunts. Legend, though, goes way beyond that, kicking up its hero past Batman-level acrobatics to near Spider-Man level super-heroics. The film's big set pieces play like a parody of a Zorro movie, though on that cartoony level they're enjoyable enough.

The rest of the movie, though, is more like Fantastic Four: a would-be “funny family action film” whose key qualification as kid entertainment is that it isn't good enough for grown-ups. Too bad. Our kids deserve better. For that matter, so do we.

Content advisory: Much stylized violence; marital discord and divorce; mixed depiction of religious figures including a weirdly religious villain. Okay for teens and up.

Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com.