“Zorro” with Jean Dujardin, a “Z” that flirts with zero

What if the character imagined by the American novelist Johnston McCulley in 1919 was in reality a loser, a son crushed by his father and, worse still, a poor lover? This is the premise of this series available on Paramount+ where Jean Dujardin dons the costume of Don Diego de la Vega. Well, with difficulty, because the masked avenger had hung up his panoply of righter of wrongs twenty years ago. And, guess what, he’s put on a bit of weight. That’s how we get into this parody whose screenplay is co-written by Noé Debré (to whom we owe the excellent series Parliament) and Benjamin Charbit (Our Lady).

We hoped that this could be a guarantee of quality. Unfortunately, it is not. The series, like the belly of this Zorro, is very flabby. Like smoke signals at the tip of a canyon, we can see the jokes coming from miles away. We are almost embarrassed for Jean Dujardin reduced to playing with his eyebrows to find, or rather to try to find, a little of the verve of OSS 117, at least the first two. He was almost better at the opening ceremony of the Rugby World Cup.

Because yes, the parody quickly becomes, too quickly, caricature. Nothing is sharp, neither the dialogues, nor the staging of this series, which, never – this is rather problematic for a comedy – finds the right rhythm. Jean Dujardin is nevertheless accompanied by a great troupe of actors. Éric Elmosnino is a cynical Don Emmanuel to perfection. Audrey Dana in the skirts of Gabriella de la Vega, Zorro’s wife, overdoes it in the skin of the unfaithful woman, just like André Dussollier who plays the megalomaniac and castrating father of the masked avenger. As we will have understood, their characters cruelly lack nuance. But, even more annoying, they seem, like us, to be bored to death, quite idle in the face of the lightness of the scenario. From this 22 million euro shipwreck, we will save Grégory Gadebois, a fool, as he should be, in the uniform of Sergeant Garcia.

We will be told that this is pure entertainment. A noble enterprise indeed that one rarely spoils by adding even a little humor and intelligence.