Review: How Bad Is The Lone Ranger? Even the Horse Is Lousy.
The only good thing in The Lone Ranger is the extravagant chase scene at the climax, which is done in just the right comic-heroic spirit. Featuring not one but two runaway trains, a humongous bridge, multiple showdowns and a damsel in repeated distress, it's what we paid our money for. But most moviegoers will have aged noticeably by then, and not only because Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski's latest lollapalooka is two and a half hours long. The combination of bad slapstick, pretentious Crayola lecturing about white capitalism as the root of all evil, stupid pet tricks and gratuitous brutality is as grotesque a hodgepodge, tone-wise, as any ostensible kiddie treat in years.
Since we all know who the main attraction is here – and it ain't Armie Hammer in the title role – let's get right to the biggest buffalo chip in sight. After years of fools like me swearing by Johnny Depp's genius, it's come to this: a 50-year-old being paid millions by Disney to wear Kabuki-for-idiots makeup topped off by a dead bird on his head. Can Depp possibly be serious when he talks in interviews about the importance to him of The Lone Ranger doing right by Native Americans? His Tonto is a minstrel act, pure and simple. At times, his cutesy reaction shots remind you of the way old-timey directors used to insert cutaways to the family Scottie covering his eyes with his paws or cocking his ears in perplexity.
There is a plot, naturally, set up by a now-ancient Tonto recalling his glory days to a child at a 1933 carnival (a frame story that goes from touching to overweening in a hurry). When we first meet him in 1869, future Lone Ranger John Reid (Hammer) is on a train taking him home to Texas after law school back East has converted him into an earnest agent of civilization. Too bad that in one of the freight cars is a shackled Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), a crook with a scarred lip permanently hoisted over his silver tooth. Butch's cronies are galloping after the train to rescue the boss from hanging, and oh, yeah: Tonto is in chains next to him. Asked his crime, he answers "Indian," which might be funny if that line didn't turn out to be downright subtle compared to most of the movie's shoehorned-in message-mongering.
After Butch's escape, Reid ends up deputized as a Texas Ranger by his lawman brother Dan – played by James Badge Dale, an actor overdue for better parts than this. Then an ambush leaves Reid the posse's only survivor, being tended to by Tonto and the future Silver – or "spirit-horse," as Tonto calls him. It says a lot about The Lone Ranger that even the horse gives a lousy performance. Compared to his CGI-abetted mugging, Mr. Ed looks like the hind end of Sir Laurence Olivier, and sometimes the front.
As for the human cast, my spirits sank as soon as Helena Bonham Carter—dear God, not her again—showed up as a whorehouse madam with an artificial leg made of ivory. All too predictably, she's got nothing to do after her gaudy introduction except mark time until the climax. In the meantime, it gradually emerges that the Ranger and Tonto's major nemesis besides Butch is an almost unrecognizably (he should be so lucky) bearded Tom Wilkinson as railroad mogul Latham Cole, who's planning to wipe out the Comanche for quick profit's sake – and also because he's, y'know, genocidally racist, looking forward to the day when "no one will know you people were ever here."
Anyone who loves classic Westerns will yawn through spotting everything Verbinski rips off more or less at random. Bits of The Searchers, Red River, High Noon, Shane, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone float by as attractively as used condoms. (One major character's traumatic back story is lifted whole from Leone's great Once Upon a Time in the West.) But what on earth do these stolen-from-my-betters routines have to do with The Lone Ranger? The original 1949-1957 TV series may not rank high in the Western canon or even loom large in most people's memories, but its archaic innocence was sweet.
In a sincere spirit of warning America's parents off bringing their tykes to the multiplex, "sweet" is one word nobody's going to apply to the 2013 version, starting with the head baddie cutting out and eating someone's innards on-camera. (It's only seen as a reflection in Reid's eye, but c'mon—six-year-olds will have nightmares anyway.) Most likely, it was at Depp's insistence that The Lone Ranger also includes effed-up scenes dramatizing our extermination of Native Americans, culminating in a massacre when they're shot down by the dozens by a Gatling gun commanded by Barry Pepper as a cavalry officer made up to resemble Custer.
The crude left-wing propaganda – no more defensible in a supposedly light-hearted kiddie flick than crude right-wing propaganda would be—just adds one more bad movie to the several Verbinski is already juggling with ten butterfingers: an inane buddy Western, a sub-Tarantino revenge flick, a Galahad-on-the-range parody and so on. In that sense, the movie's defining moment is the cut from the massacre's aftermath – dead bodies liturgized with mournful music – to Mr. Ed in a tree with the Lone Ranger's white hat on his head. For honesty's sake, I'd better report that the preview audience laughed right on cue.
Starting with Hammer – who does his damnedest to stay engaging and committed even when the script keeps turning him into Will Ferrell—Verbinski's waste of talented performers amounts to another sort of massacre. Because he reads lines like a lizard pissed off that it's been awakened from a sunbath, I've enjoyed William Fichtner on TV for years, but Butch Cavendish is the kind of role that obliges him to repeat the same ain't-I-a-stinker effects over and over. As for Barry Pepper, I'm pretty sure he's never been worse in a movie, but what are you going to do when your false beard is literally flecked with saliva as you give the command to open up with the Gatling gun? To be honest, there's only one member of the cast who looks like he's right in his element, namely lucrative Disney guano. In a just world, The Lone Ranger would end with the bird on Depp's head croaking, "Nevermore."
There is a plot, naturally, set up by a now-ancient Tonto recalling his glory days to a child at a 1933 carnival (a frame story that goes from touching to overweening in a hurry). When we first meet him in 1869, future Lone Ranger John Reid (Hammer) is on a train taking him home to Texas after law school back East has converted him into an earnest agent of civilization. Too bad that in one of the freight cars is a shackled Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), a crook with a scarred lip permanently hoisted over his silver tooth. Butch's cronies are galloping after the train to rescue the boss from hanging, and oh, yeah: Tonto is in chains next to him. Asked his crime, he answers "Indian," which might be funny if that line didn't turn out to be downright subtle compared to most of the movie's shoehorned-in message-mongering.
After Butch's escape, Reid ends up deputized as a Texas Ranger by his lawman brother Dan – played by James Badge Dale, an actor overdue for better parts than this. Then an ambush leaves Reid the posse's only survivor, being tended to by Tonto and the future Silver – or "spirit-horse," as Tonto calls him. It says a lot about The Lone Ranger that even the horse gives a lousy performance. Compared to his CGI-abetted mugging, Mr. Ed looks like the hind end of Sir Laurence Olivier, and sometimes the front.
As for the human cast, my spirits sank as soon as Helena Bonham Carter—dear God, not her again—showed up as a whorehouse madam with an artificial leg made of ivory. All too predictably, she's got nothing to do after her gaudy introduction except mark time until the climax. In the meantime, it gradually emerges that the Ranger and Tonto's major nemesis besides Butch is an almost unrecognizably (he should be so lucky) bearded Tom Wilkinson as railroad mogul Latham Cole, who's planning to wipe out the Comanche for quick profit's sake – and also because he's, y'know, genocidally racist, looking forward to the day when "no one will know you people were ever here."
Anyone who loves classic Westerns will yawn through spotting everything Verbinski rips off more or less at random. Bits of The Searchers, Red River, High Noon, Shane, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone float by as attractively as used condoms. (One major character's traumatic back story is lifted whole from Leone's great Once Upon a Time in the West.) But what on earth do these stolen-from-my-betters routines have to do with The Lone Ranger? The original 1949-1957 TV series may not rank high in the Western canon or even loom large in most people's memories, but its archaic innocence was sweet.
In a sincere spirit of warning America's parents off bringing their tykes to the multiplex, "sweet" is one word nobody's going to apply to the 2013 version, starting with the head baddie cutting out and eating someone's innards on-camera. (It's only seen as a reflection in Reid's eye, but c'mon—six-year-olds will have nightmares anyway.) Most likely, it was at Depp's insistence that The Lone Ranger also includes effed-up scenes dramatizing our extermination of Native Americans, culminating in a massacre when they're shot down by the dozens by a Gatling gun commanded by Barry Pepper as a cavalry officer made up to resemble Custer.
The crude left-wing propaganda – no more defensible in a supposedly light-hearted kiddie flick than crude right-wing propaganda would be—just adds one more bad movie to the several Verbinski is already juggling with ten butterfingers: an inane buddy Western, a sub-Tarantino revenge flick, a Galahad-on-the-range parody and so on. In that sense, the movie's defining moment is the cut from the massacre's aftermath – dead bodies liturgized with mournful music – to Mr. Ed in a tree with the Lone Ranger's white hat on his head. For honesty's sake, I'd better report that the preview audience laughed right on cue.
Starting with Hammer – who does his damnedest to stay engaging and committed even when the script keeps turning him into Will Ferrell—Verbinski's waste of talented performers amounts to another sort of massacre. Because he reads lines like a lizard pissed off that it's been awakened from a sunbath, I've enjoyed William Fichtner on TV for years, but Butch Cavendish is the kind of role that obliges him to repeat the same ain't-I-a-stinker effects over and over. As for Barry Pepper, I'm pretty sure he's never been worse in a movie, but what are you going to do when your false beard is literally flecked with saliva as you give the command to open up with the Gatling gun? To be honest, there's only one member of the cast who looks like he's right in his element, namely lucrative Disney guano. In a just world, The Lone Ranger would end with the bird on Depp's head croaking, "Nevermore."
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