Plot
Native American Comanche Tonto (Johnny Depp) and sole-survivor of a brutal slaughter – come spirit-walker and legendary masked renegade for justice the Lone Ranger – John Reid (Armie Hammer) team-up to bring notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to justice. Naturally however, things aren’t quite as they seem. To the detriment of trains everywhere.
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| Hollister were really pushing the boat out with their newest models. |
Sequels and adaptations…you can’t move for sequels and adaptations in modern cinema. The logic is sound (it’s a hell of a lot easier to make that all important profit) but some are perplexingly pointless: Percy Jackson 2? Total Recall remake? However, with its radio show, comic books, TV show and everything else you dig up over a 70-year history, The Lone Ranger was begging for the modern Hollywood treatment. Not that Hollywood has done well on the Western front in recent history – Wild, Wild, West and Cowboys & Aliens…oops – but it was a similar situation with those scurvy dogs on the seven seas until Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp came along.
Now they’re teaming up again, hoping lightening can strike twice with The Lone Ranger.
Well…at least it’s no Wild, Wild, West.
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| Complete with comedy side-kick horse. We need more of those in the world. |
Outside of the omnipresent grimmer-than-a-public-toilet light filter that depresses the entire production, The Lone Ranger is something of a visual feast. The hats, boots, costumes and doodads are all present and accounted for and, thanks to the few characters that flirt with vibrancy, Ranger is as aesthetically coherent as it is visually engaging. How much is on-location and how much is green-screen is up for debate, but at least all those desert vistas look appropriately vista-ry.
For a film like The Lone Ranger, where you’re tussling with seven decades of collective nostalgia, the treatment of the characters is something akin to a game of Operation, but instead of setting the light off when you mess up you murder someone’s childhood. Johnny Depp as Tonto is back boots-and-all into the role of Captain Jack, albeit with a different costume and accent. And make no mistake, he’s still entertaining - all wide-eyes, goofy charm, gurning ways and flailing limbs - but the Captain Jack shtick has gone too far now (it’d gone too far by the end of the Piratestrilogy) and Tonto is just the eponymous dead cow back on the flogger (that’s a thing right, the place of flogging?). He’s even colour coordinated.
The sense of villainy is also far too vague and indistinct to matter. When 11 out of 10 men are greasy and bearded across the broad range of ‘brown to grey’ it’s hard to tell quite who’s who. Not to mention quite hard to care.
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| Captain Jack Sparrow took unemployment hard. |
When The Lone Ranger feels like it however, it can be the most entertaining film of the year. Depp is as capable as ever as the enigmatic weirdo (déjà vu aside), Armie Hammer holds up surprisingly well as the inept-come-mythological hero, the music canters along with an irresistible joviality and the action is as good as anything else yet seen in this blow-out of a summer; all jocular quips, slapstick clashes and visceral comedy. Rangertreats trains the same as too many films this year have treated skyscrapers: like Lego. Working on a smaller scale has allowed Ranger to both distance itself from the apocalyptic mediocrity and create tight, tense and ludicrously OTT action sequences. And we can all enjoy that.
It’s ultimately half an hour plus too long. The climactic train-robbing blow-out is an absolute hoot, the pinnacle of blockbuster (or should that be ‘Bruckheimer’) entertainment that tears by to the tune of that timeless riff of Rossini’s William Tell Overture – you know the one – but there’s a definite sense of lethargy by the time it comes chugging along. When the film isn’t blowing up dust or engaging in remarkably bloodless violence it feels much like how horse travel itself must have felt back in those days: repetitive, largely bereft of anything more interesting than a cactus and very likely to give you a rash somewhere.
Of the many franchises this year - new and old, sequels and start-ups - The Lone Ranger would arguably best benefit from a good sequeling (Stateside money woes aside). It so nearly threatens to be so good but frequently, almost purposefully shoots itself in the foot. For every legitimately interesting character – Bonham Carter’s underused sassy brothel owner Red Harrington - there’s roughly a billion identikit grizzled men. For every fast, furious and exciting sequence, there’s a drudgerous exchange that adds little to the characters and less to the story. The framing device, where an old(er) Tonto regales a young pretender with stories of his adventures, is entirely superfluous and actively pace-breaking. With seven decades of source material to work with – and the industrial clout of Disney behind it – there’s more than enough scope for a barnstorming Lone Ranger film, the sort that this particular canter only pretends to be.
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| You can tell he's a bad guy because of all the ugly. |
Quite where its Stateside failures have come from (financially and critically) is hard to tell. The Lone Ranger is by no means perfect and has a swag bag of miss-steps, but it’s still an endearing and entertaining Western romp, one of those rare films that’ll paste a smile across your face.
3/5
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