REVIEW: The Lone Ranger

Courtesy of Disney

The Lone Ranger sucks.

I seriously considered letting that sentence serve as the entirety of my review. After all, why exert more creative energy than the people who actually came up with the movie’s plot? But that wouldn’t be fair to you folks. I should at least spend a few paragraphs telling you why The Lone Ranger sucks. But if all you’re looking for is “go” or “don’t go,” you can stop reading now. Do not spend your hard-earned money on this piece of garbage.

The sad part is that a big screen remake of the 1950s television icon (who got his start in a 1930s radio show) could’ve been, if not essential, at least interesting if done the right way. Clearly, the team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise went with “debacle” instead. Director Gore Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (along with non-Pirates scribe Justin Haythe) are responsible for a bloated, disconcertingly violent and tonally schizophrenic film that insults viewers’ intelligence at every turn.

What’s more, they absolutely waste Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer – their two charismatic lead actors – along with William Fichtner, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter, James Badge Dale and a dozen other terrific character actors. That’s simply unforgivable.

The film opens with an ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp), on display at a 1930s-era fair in San Francisco. He mistakes a little boy wearing a black mask for his old partner, and begins to tell the kid about their first adventures together. (I’m not sure who thought these bookends were a good idea, but cutting them would’ve shaved about 15 minutes off the running time.)

After that, we finally meet the titular character as he’s heading home from studying law at a fancy school in the east. John Reid (Hammer) is excited to see his brother (Dale) and former flame (Ruth Wilson) again, but plans change when the train he’s traveling on is hijacked by a team of bandits out to rescue their leader Butch Cavendish (Fichtner). While trying to help recapture the bad guy, Reid runs into Tonto (Depp), a Native American with his own reasons for wanting to take down the villain.

Six hours later (at least that’s how long it felt sitting in the theater), a freshly deputized Reid sets out to find the bandits with his brother and a team of fellow rangers. After Cavendish stages an ambush that leaves Reid as the sole survivor, the lone ranger (ta da!) teams up with Tonto to take down their common enemy. Other than a genuinely exciting climax, which culminates in several characters fighting inside and on top of two speeding trains, their mission is tedious and redundant.

A no-frills, Tombstone-style version of the classic story seems like it would’ve been the way to go. Instead, the audience is subjected to a torturous 149-minute origin story of a character whose reason for being is found in his name. The Lone Ranger. See? Boom, done. We don’t need to spend hours watching how he became a ranger or why he’s lone.

More and more, I miss the days when viewers learned everything they needed to know about a character’s back story in a couple of lines of dialogue. Those were also the days when a movie was a self-contained piece of entertainment instead of a multi-hour trailer for a sequel that doesn’t (and will likely never) exist.

As long as we’re reminiscing, I miss when filmmakers liked – or at least understood – the characters they were making movies about. Based on the evidence, Verbinski, Rossio, Elliot and Haythe flat-out hate the Lone Ranger. Despite Hammer’s best efforts to instill the role with a realistic personality and motivations, he’s undercut at every turn by a creative team who thinks the character is an idiot.

The film is two-and-a-half hours long because Reid catches Cavendish several times, but lets him go because “justice has to be delivered in the courts.” Apparently that’s code for “the movie still has an hour to go” because it’s established early on that the bad guy has already been sentenced to hang. And keep in mind Reid continues to maintain this philosophy even after he watches Cavendish cut out his brother’s heart and eat it in front of him (in a friggin’ PG-13 Disney flick).

The creative team doesn’t have much more respect for Tonto. They transform the Lone Ranger’s trusted advisor and dear friend into a buffoonish stereotype who hates Reid as much as they do, just so the film can reuse the tired mismatched-partners-learn-to-appreciate-each-other subplot. Except by the end they still don’t seem to appreciate each other very much.

The film’s last two minutes sum up precisely how Verbinski and the screenwriters feel about the Lone Ranger. After the bad guys are vanquished and the character has decided to devote his life to fighting injustice, he jumps up on his trusted steed – which rears up on his back legs – and shouts, “Hi-yo, Silver! Away!” It’s a genuinely cool moment, one that evokes decades of pop culture goodwill. And it’s undercut immediately by a reaction shot of a mortified Tonto yelling, “Don’t ever do that again!”

Ugh.

The Lone Ranger is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, and some suggestive material.

Grade: D