Review of The Lone Ranger (1956) by Tom L — 14 Mar 2015

In a summer where people started to turn against blockbusters, this movie was the poster child of the big budget whipping boy. In a year with Star Trek Into Darkness, World War Z, and Man of Steel, The Lone Ranger managed to come out on top of movie that everyone just fucking hated.

And it seemed like right out of the gate too. Before it even came out in that hateful summer. From a super serious trailer that promised all the grim dark origin explorations that people were growing less and less fond of, to a overblown scale and another seemingly irritating makeup performance by Johnny Depp, things looked grim.

It had a big hill to climb with those, in addition to being made by the guy who made 2 abysmal Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. But in spite of all the vitriol and anti hype this movie had garnered, it isn't the abysmal train wreck everyone claimed.

It's not a good movie, by any stretch. The middle is where this movie lies, a movie of absolute mediocrity. Of all the problems the movie has, none is more harming than the awful framing device. Having a ludicrously old Tonto telling the story to a young boy is just ridiculous, killing any potential momentum that the story could hope to maintain.

The rest of the movie could have been great, but this intercutting between this and the story is so misguided to be crippling from the get go. But the rest of the movie doesn't help. For one, it is an origin story that feels like it's embarrassed by it's characters.

John Reid (a game Armie Hammer) is more of a bumbling ninny than a hero in training until he just becomes a hero. Tonto is a blank void of annoying ticks in place of characteristics, not surprising due to being played by Johnny Depp.

In all fairness to him, this is the best of his bad performances. Instead of being obviously and obnoxiously bad, he's subtly bad. He's a blank for the most part, with brief moments of mugging for the camera.

Tonto is a typical crazy person in the movie way. He's not interesting, just there. There's a lot of humor stemming from how goofy and campy the entire property is, making it kind of smug and making us feel like jerk offs for even watching it.

And the relationship between John and Tonto is really just so antagonistic to be ham fisted that they become friends at the end. It's such an ugly relationship at first. Then there's the plot, which the movie takes it's damn time actually getting to.

It's typical action western fare, with double crosses and greed the play of the day. William Fichtner gives a good performance, but one that is completely not of this movie. He belongs in something else entirely.

Which is another problem this movie has. It is such a tonal nightmare, whiplashing from goofy comedy to super gritty/violent action flick to over the top cartoonish action to longing love story, it's a headache.

And for an action movie of this size and budget, it has surprisingly little action aside from the beginning and end. I will say that even though the beginning is a miserable slog with a bland action sequence, the movie picks up a bit at the halfway point and gets some momentum going (despite adding a new villain for no damn reason with no real character).

It picks up until a very enjoyable train sequence set to the old Lone Ranger theme, basically becoming an actual Lone Ranger story at the very end for 20 minutes. There's two apt comparisons I could make here.

John Carter and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood. John Carter in the big budget failure with too much cartoony CGI and no heart, and Robin Hood in the super serious reboot that isn't interesting and isn't really a story that fits with the property until the very end (literally the last minute for Robin Hood).

This is better than both of them, but only a little bit more than John Carter (a fuck ton better than Robin Hood). What kills this to me is the lack of passion, an overwhelming feeling of antipathy. Verbinski doesn't really bring a spark to the movie for the most part, wasting Armie Hammer and allowing Depp to make another wacky character.

It's a shame, but it's what we got. So while it is still the worst of those big budget blockbusters that summer, it isn't cinematic cancer equivalent to Tusk.