The Lone Ranger
Starring: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer and William Fictner
Directed By: Gore Verbinski
Reviewed by Brendan Dousi
[rating: 3/5]
With an ever mounting number of remakes, rehashes, reboots and re-dos gracing (or burdening) our screens in the past year or so, will Disney’s plan to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ify classic western serial The Lone Ranger pay off or will this property, along with others of late, be left behind in the dust?
The Lone Ranger follows lawyer John Reid (Armie Hammer) as he comes back into town and gets caught up in a manhunt for escaped criminal Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner). When Butch takes someone dear away from John and leaves him for dead, John puts on a mask and teams up with the slightly crazed Native American, Tonto (Johnny Depp), who has his own reasons for joining up with this new Lone Ranger. As they pursue their vow to bring Butch to justice, the plot thickens as they discover plans that hint there might be more at play here than just the fiendish Butch Cavendish.
This movie was extremely fun, it had the great trait and strength of not taking itself too seriously, all while never shying away from the more mature themes of the Western Genre. People die, bad guys are bad and heroes are heroes. It’s Western at its simplest, and at some points it’s most fun.
Problems arise, however, when you take one of the most basic Western stories you can tell and convolute it into a two and a half hour epic. The main draw-back of the film as a whole is that it gets extremely clunky around the middle and you find yourself going “well, this is a pretty long film” right at about the 3/4 point. Something no film maker wants to happen. A lot of that middle section should have been trimmed and the film stream-lined into a 90-100 minute joy-ride. Luckily, the final, most action-packed and most comical scene of the film makes up for the clunkyness of the previous 30 minutes and fills you with that childish wonder you wanted from this film.
While full of fun set-pieces and amazing special effects, The Lone Ranger finds the majority of its strength in the casting. While most of the Villains may come across as generic, dirty Western bad guys the heroes of the piece, Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger and Johnny Depp’s Tonto truly shine. With amazing chemistry and masterful comic timing, these two actors seems to be a match made in heaven. Definitely enough to get you thinking you wouldn’t mind coming back for a second instalment, if not just to watch these two keep bouncing off one another.
More recently I’ve found myself thinking “man, how awesome would it be to be a kid right now?” watching all of these epic spectacles and knowing younger audiences would have loved them. The Lone Ranger is no exception.
