YMMV / The Legend of Zorro

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The entire mock swordfight between Joaquín and his teacher is generally seen as out of place for an action adventure film and more at home in a children's adventure film. Especially agregious is that Joaquín never really demonstrates again the absurd level of Combat Parkour skills he shows in this scene.
• Catharsis Factor: The two Pinkerton agents in the movie were working for a noble enough cause, to preserve the United States from being thrown into chaos by the Knights of Aragon. How they actually went about doing it involved blackmailing Elena into divorcing Alejandro and throwing Alejandro's life into total misery. So even though they may have had good intentions for the country, Alejandro grabbing them and slamming their faces into the prison bars was more than satisfying to watch and well-deserved for the two.
• Older Than They Think: The film took quite a bit of criticism for giving Zorro a boy sidekick and having his love interest humiliate and put him down throughout the movie. However, this film wasn't the first time the Zorro character was put in this kind of scenario; in the mid- to late-'90s, there was Kaiketsu Zorro, an anime series where Zorro had a young boy sidekick accompany him on adventures in every episode as well as a love interest who put him down almost all the time. In fact, there was even an episode where Zorro had to rescue his love interest from an evil nobleman who claimed to be the son of a Duke and who was wooing her, not unlike how Zorro in this movie had to rescue Elena from Count Armand, who also happened to be wooing her. One wonders whether this episode actually inspired the film's whole plot.
• Retroactive Recognition: Michael Emerson is one of the Pinkerton detectives, a year before taking the role of Ben Linus.
• The Scrappy:
  • Joaquín was thrown into the mix, adding a needless (and quite annoying) child element when all people were wanting was to see Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones kick any asses they might have missed from the first movie.
  • Jacob McGivens is considered by many to be a terrible and utterly forgettable villain, due to being very ineffective, useless, incompetent, obnoxious and having a distractingly unconvincing scar.
• Sequelitis: The general consensus seems to be that The Legend of Zorro was not so legendary, despite having the same leads and director. This is largely due to the addition of many more slapstick elements, scrappy characters like Zorro's son, and a disliked marriage trouble subplot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: On paper, the film was a pretty unique and interesting sequel, as not many action/adventure franchises bother to actually explore the real romantic relationship of the leads after they hook up in the first installment, not to mention it also deconstructs hard the whole thing by showing how difficult can it be to balance a life as husband and father with the usual heroics. Despite this, the film seems unable to decide whether it wants to employ this premise seriously or just use it for cheap laughs and drama, with Alejandro and Elena's earnest development clashing painfully against Joaquín's 2000s kid appeal goofiness.

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