Musketeers & Swashbucklers

Hollywood spent decades trying to revive the Errol Flynn picture and mostly produced expensive embarrassments. Then in 1998 Martin Campbell made The Mask of Zorro and got everything right at once. Anthony Hopkins is the aging Don Diego, broken by prison, passing the cape to a thief he has to civilize first. Antonio Banderas is the most charismatic blade since Flynn himself, and Catherine Zeta-Jones turns a sword fight into the best scene in the movie purely on the strength of how much fun she is clearly having.

What makes it work is that it remembers the swashbuckler was always half a comedy. The duels are choreographed for laughs as much as tension, the romance is played at full heat, and the politics (a corrupt governor, a stolen province, a peasantry with no champion) give the swordplay something to be about. Campbell would go on to reboot James Bond twice. This is the film that proved he understood what makes a hero thrilling rather than merely competent.

For most of its history the pirate story has been a children's adventure with a parrot on its shoulder. Black Sails dragged it into adulthood and refused to apologize. Built as a prequel to Treasure Island, it gives the young Long John Silver, Captain Flint and a deck of real historical pirates (Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Jack Rackham) a four-season political tragedy about the brief, doomed attempt to build a free society outside the reach of empire.

The show is gorgeous and brutal, with ship battles that put the Pirates of the Caribbean films to shame and a scripts-first commitment to letting characters argue their way through scenes. It treats piracy as a labor movement, a war against the merchant class, and asks the question the genre usually skips: what does a person become when they decide the civilized world is the enemy? It is the best pirate fiction made in this century, and it is barely about treasure at all.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag almost forgot it was an Assassin's Creed game, and that is exactly why it is the best one. Ubisoft set you loose as Edward Kenway across a beautiful open Caribbean in the golden age of piracy, gave you a ship you genuinely come to love, and let you sail wherever the horizon went. The naval combat (broadsides, boarding, sea shanties sung by the crew as you cross open water) remains the gold standard for putting a player on the deck of a sailing ship.

What lifts it above mere mechanics is the cast: Blackbeard, Charles Vane and a young Mary Read are written as real people rather than waxwork legends, and Kenway's arc from greedy opportunist to something like a man with a conscience earns its ending. If you want to know why the swashbuckler refuses to die, play three hours of this with the wind at your back. The genre was always, secretly, about freedom of movement.

Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride is the swashbuckler that knows it is a swashbuckler and is delighted about it. The framing device (a grandfather reading to a sick boy who keeps interrupting) lets the film wink at every cliche while still committing to them completely. The duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity between Westley and Inigo Montoya, both fencing left-handed as a courtesy before revealing they are right-handed, is one of the great sword fights on film precisely because it is also a conversation between two men who like each other.

And Inigo himself, played by Mandy Patinkin, carries the genre's beating heart: a man who has spent his entire life training for a single revenge, repeating the same six words until they become a war cry. Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. That is Edmond Dantes, that is d'Artagnan, that is the whole genre distilled into one perfect, patient promise.