Django/Zorro was a pretty good read, and would have made a decent movie if SONY and Tarantino had pursued it. Both as a sequel to Django, and expansion of the Zorro franchise.
http://www.businessinsider.com/djang...-movie-2014-12
Similar to Dynamite's other crossover Lone Ranger/Zorro, by nature it mostly favors the later characters, who are shown in their prime, while Zorro is older at the end of his career, somewhat passing the mantle role. He's mostly there to validate the "newer" characters whose time has come, while he fades away.
So if you are a Lone Ranger fan, or in this case Django, great! For Zorro it's good, but not great.
Mostly it comes from casting an aging Zorro in more modern times, and falling back on the suposedly stuck in his past, unwilling to adapt trope, particularly in the use of a gun.
It's a fine romanticized stance to take, if they want to show Zorro can successfully get by without resorting to a gun!, or will force what he considers a more honorable sword duel where he can, that's great! He does that! But that is not what they are doing here, to the contrary, they have him take a never use a gun stance which in the end they imply diminishes Zorro, while the new guys prevail and are celebrated for embracing the gun.
It's a weird strict stance they chose to retrofit onto the character, which seems to be an invention by Dynamite. As Zorro in most popular portrayals; Fairbanks, Tyrone Powers, Disney(Guy Williams & Alex Toth) and especially the pulpy McCulley version, that Tarantino seems to want to allude to, all had him with no problem using a gun when necessary.
He was in fact expert with it. Expert marksman, quick on the draw, could shoot to disarm which is what he mostly did.
That rant aside, Diego de la Vega still holds up even as an aging hero, and was well portrayed.
The story was based loosely on real life events and character- James Reavis - a really interesting character and chapter in American history, as it "came into" huge swaths of land once deemed home to many Mexican Americans who lived and worked it.
It was the basis for the movie The Baron of Arizona an old Vincent price movie, that Tarantino seems to have borrowed heavily from.
Both Zorro and Django fit in well as characters coming from very different times, and places, including their POV's, at a crossroad in American history and expansion, in a territory where they are both at home and strangers, and ultimately find common ground.
And in the end a new hero (who is mostly ignored and unsung in American popular culture) emerges.
If this had been a movie, whoever would have got to play the Baron, the villain of the story, would have stolen the movie.
It's visually staged and reads like a film, and has a big cinematic Peckinpah finish.