Something is off balance with this new version of “The Lone Ranger”. Something just doesn’t feel right. If you take the parts and examine you will find a Disney funded, mega-budgeted, Western Summer Flick based on a decades old character that stars one of the world’s biggest celebrities, Mr. Johnny Depp. You would assume a family-friendly adventure that would introduce the Masked Man to millions (Hell, he’s even before my time) while entertaining those of all ages. But what is waiting is a bloated movie that, for some reason, is pre-occupied with being mean-spirited and unpleasant. The sum of the parts add up to an end product is just plain bizarre.
Let’s place the blame on director Gore Verbinski. Verbinski brought us the first 3 “Pirates of the Caribbean” films and those really devolved into an ugly mess. Then he turned his cartoonish sensibilities towards an actual cartoon and came up with “Rango”. There I thought his off-kilter vision worked and Verbinski delivered an abstract animated film that brought to life an ugly and quirky world. He approaches “The Lone Ranger” with much of the same rationale and it backfires.
The film is littered with greedy capitalists, legless prostitutes, cannibalistic villains and cannibalistic rabbits (???). The violence is unfiltered and brutal in spurts and starts. Corpses are pummeled as they fall from horses and trains. Native Americans are massacred and poor Ruth Wilson, who plays the Lone Ranger’s love interest/brother’s widow, is given a role that nearly entirely consists of scenes where she is sexually harassed.
The plot is simple and contains reveals and surprises that never really surprise once revealed. I’m usually terrible at putting the pieces together if a plot has a mystery to present but I figured it out way too early. There is a pointless wraparound that takes place in 1933 San Francisco (the year “The Lone Ranger” radio show premiered). Armie Hammer plays the Lone Ranger’s innocence and virtue with the right kind of poise but the performance is dwarfed by the inconstant tone of everything else going on around him.
Of all the misguided problems plaguing “The Lone Ranger,” the biggest offender is actually the main reason everyone is interested in the first place: Johnny Depp. Here he adds yet another role to his ever-growing list of Weird Characters who wear Pale Makeup:
- Barnabas in “Dark Shadows”
- Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland”
- Sweeny Todd
- Willy Wonka
- Edward Scissorhands
It’s an exhausted acting choice that Depp usually makes for Tim Burton directed projects but here he has been so kind as to let Verbinski helm a movie where he spends his screen time with white makeup smeared all over his face. He plays Tonto, a slightly insane Indian with a dead bird adorned on his head. His madness does not fit the world of The Lone Ranger, the character is too contemporary and then there is the question of appropriateness of a white actor playing a Native American. It never gels and results in an act that could be viewed by some as being comparable to wearing Black Face while singing “mammy”. I’m sure there is at least one Native American actor they could have been secured to utter the wonderful line “Stupid White Man”. Getting a stupid whit man to do it is just another decision here that just doesn’t make sense. Regardless of your stance on this (I usually try to run away from Politically Correctness but this is bugging me) the performance is distracting and out of place.
When you consider the amount of money it took to bring this waste to life (Well north of $200 million dollars) it’s easy to view “The Lone Ranger” as a travesty and a wasted opportunity. It’s going to be hard to recoup Disney’s money when there is no target audience to come running. “The Lone Ranger” was made for no one.