There’s a moment early on in The Lone Ranger where Tonto is transporting the nearly-deceased John Reid (the man who will become the titular hero) through the desert, dragged on a litter behind the horse Silver. The audience has already seen several examples of Silver’s mystical “spirit horse” powers, but in this particular moment, Silver pauses to expel the contents of his bowels, and then proceeds to drag the litter through the new-made manure, smearing Reid’s head and hair through the shit. I’m sure director Gore Verbinski thought he had inserted a moment of comic relief into his adaptation of the classic hero, but what he really did was create a metaphor for this treatment of the character: Verbinski, Disney, and especially Johnny Depp (who produced the film as well as playing sidekick Tonto) take these iconic characters and drag both them and the audience through a pile of excrement, leading to the most disappointing adaptation since Reid’s descendant also got a big screen adaptation – The Green Hornet.
While the character has been around for decades, in mediums ranging from previous disastrous movies (1981′s The Legend of the Lone Ranger still serves as the franchise’s low-water mark), animated television shows, and radio plays, most people aren’t that familiar with the story of John Reid (Armie Hammer), giving Verbinski a phenomenal opportunity to tell the story of a Texas Ranger who survives an ambush and returns for retribution as one of the very first masked heroes. In this origin story we first meet Reid as a hopeful lawyer who frowns upon gunplay and hopes to use the letter of the law to clean things up. Instead, Reid winds up seeking justice against the cannibalistic Butch Cavendish (William Fitchner) after the villain kills all the other nearby Rangers, including John’s brother – but in the old West, justice doesn’t always come from a book, and the good men are sometimes forced to wear masks… why? Because Tonto says so… but more on that in a few minutes.
While The Lone Ranger doesn’t really take many liberties with the character’s story, the “big twist” is that the story here is being told from Tonto’s point of view. An elderly Tonto shares the tale of the Lone Ranger’s quest for justice with a little boy. While the makeup job is far superior, the whole device is far too reminiscent of Emilio Estevez sharing the continuing adventures of Billy the Kid in Young Guns II, right down to the old man in both stories wandering off into the desert in the conclusion. Sadly, that’s not the only borrowed device The Lone Ranger feels like it has, although it’s probably the best one. Other aspects of the plot feel reminiscent of everything from Wild Wild West (the Will Smith vehicle, not the classic television show) to Jonah Hex. Essentially if there’s a poorly made western from the last few decades, The Lone Ranger borrows from it, or at least it feels like it does. The problem is it borrows poor elements from poor movies and doesn’t improve on them, leading to a tone that feels like those other bombs.
Armie Hammer does his best as John Reid, bringing the charm he’s put into other performances, but he doesn’t get much to work with here. If they had played the character straight-laced, Hammer might have had a better time with it, but instead the movie makes Reid out to be a bit of an idiot at times – sometimes the result of his book-learned naivete, and sometimes just for the sake of a laugh. Hammer proves it’s hard to be charming when you’re inconsistently the butt of the joke though. If the film had gone all-in and made Reid a complete joke with Tonto being the brains of the operation (like Without a Clue did with Sherlock Holmes), Hammer might have had more to work with. Instead his character is inconsistent and more than a bit frustrating. It doesn’t help that they try to develop his character by tossing in a forsaken romance with the woman his brother married – a romance that, in its conclusion, completely reveals to everyone who Reid is. In other words, if the ongoing debate about whether Reid should wear a mask through the movie wasn’t frustrating enough, the conclusion pretty much sets the Lone Ranger up as the masked man whose identity everyone knows. So much for the iconic “who was that masked man?” line. So why wear the mask? Because Tonto says so, which leads us to the film’s biggest problem.
Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski are responsible for Depp’s most iconic character, Captain Jack Sparrow. Somehow the actor and director failed to realize what audiences quickly did – the character never should have worked. He was a fascinating exercise in characterization that managed to transcend the ridiculousness of himself and find success. As Depp and Verbinski continued to mine that character, however, he wore out his welcome. By the third Pirates of the Caribbean picture audiences were suffering from too much Captain Jack, and the fourth film, which saw Jack brought to the forefront, was criticized for it. The duo go just as ridiculous here with Depp’s portrayal of Tonto, an Indian brave the audience quickly realizes is more than a little crack-brained. I won’t go into the challenges of having Depp, a non-Indian, playing the iconic character – after all, that’s an actor’s job – to play what they aren’t. The problem is that Depp yet again tries to create an outlandish character akin to Sparrow, Willy Wonka, Edward Scissorhands, and so many others of his career, and the problem is that we’re tired of the outlandishness. Depp had a good run with these bizarre characters, but he’s worn the shtick out to the point that it’s no longer bizarre; it’s simply cliche. Instead of using a compass that doesn’t work, Tonto continually feeds his bird hat, a gesture that gets tiresome the third or fourth time Tonto does it. Depp needs to abandon the absurdity – it’s no longer fascinating or even entertaining. What he really needs is to work with a director who will reign him in instead of allowing him to run wild. Unfortunately, with Depp moving his own production company to Disney in the past few weeks, I suspect we’ll be subject to even more ridiculousness. Unless something changes, however, the result will be more cinematic bombs, just like this one, and Depp will be the one responsible.
It’s particularly a shame watching The Lone Ranger continue the trend of weak contemporary western pictures, especially since Verbinski and Depp managed to capture the spirit of the western a lot better with the animated Rango. Instead the classic character gets a shoddy treatment that spends too much time on Depp’s antics and not enough time on creating the character it’s supposed to be about. The story is weak, the tone inconsistent, and with a bloated nearly three-hour run time, the experience just gets weaker and weaker as the film progresses. For those who thought John Carter was a huge bomb, Verbinski actually manages to make that adaptation feel a little stronger by showing what a withering experience at the movie theater can really be like, or at least simulating that feeling of being dragged through horse manure as authentically for the audience as possible.
-Rafe Telsch
