The Lone Ranger Review: Gore Verbinski's return to the western genre is a disappointing mess

Dir. Gore Verbinski
149 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Watch Trailer

The Lone Ranger seems to be on track to be yet another underperforming live action Disney outing.  The studio has had some trouble recently, with John Carter and Pirates 4 racking in less than stellar numbers (although The Avengers certainly helped), and this upcoming weekend will likely be dominated by Despicable Me 2.  This latest flick had its own share of production problems, with a budget that ballooned up to an estimated $250 million.  It got to a point where the director, the actors, and even Jerry Bruckheimer all deferred their salaries by 20% just to stymie the cost.  Despite all the issues I remained optimistic; Gore Verbinski knew how to breathe life into a film based off of an animatronic pirate ride and made, in my opinion, one of the best westerns of the past few years with Rango.  But even with Verbinski behind the reigns, The Lone Ranger falls disappointingly flat.  There are many great ideas sprinkled throughout, but it adds up to nothing in this boring, over-long, over-produced Western checklist.


You've seen everything here before.  The evil railroad guys, the outlaw hero, the wisecracking sidekick, the obvious love interest: the plot is pretty uninspired.  The narrative is told through the unreliable narration of a hidden-under-makeup Johnny Depp as older Tonto in 1933.  I suppose this was meant to give the film a "tall tale" quality, but just ends up lowering the stakes because you think this might all be imaginary.  In the 1869 storyline, John Reid (Armie Hammer) aka the Lone Ranger, is chasing after the bad guys who killed his brother, who likely have some connection to the railroad.  That really is the main thrust of the plot, which could have resulted in a fun, quick revenge story, but the filmmakers drew it out to 2.5 hours to throw in every Western 101 trope for no reason other than spectacle alone.

I did like the style of the film though.  The cinematography is beautiful at times and it felt particularly gritty for a Disney film (even when compared to Pirates of the Caribbean).  People die and get shot, and there's no shying away from it.  But perhaps the best thing to come from this is Depp's rendition of Tonto.  In previous iterations of The Lone Ranger, Tonto was the sidekick, the "boy wonder" in the relationship if you will.  But here he kind of is the lead character; he narrates the film and is featured the most prominently throughout.  Kind of like how Christoph Waltz stole Jamie Foxx's thunder in Django Unchained, Depp overshadows Armie Hammer considerably (though they do have a nice chemistry together).  Depp just knows how to infuse these oddball characters with so much life; in the movie Tonto wears a dead bird on his head (some sort of spirit guide), and he'll randomly feed it bread crumbs.  Or he'll pretend to do a Native American chant to get himself out of a bind.  The whole look and design of that character is really different and just interesting to look at; I give Depp a lot of credit for pushing for this particular design of Tonto, with the dead bird and goth facepaint makeup, for it is one of the few redeeming qualities of the picture.

The Lone Ranger is 80 years old.  It began as a radio program in 1933 and the height of its popularity was half a decade ago, so it's tough to reinvent something that remains in most people's minds as a nostalgic relic of a simpler time.  The film tries really hard to update the myth for today's audiences, but just ends up being a mess, like it doesn't know what it wants to be.  One minute we have to feel for the genocide of native americans, then there's a gag with a horse in a tree.  They just threw everything against the wall and hoped something would stick.  But almost nothing stuck.  The action sequences were bland and repetitive, the score was definitely not one of Hans Zimmer's best, the humor felt forced, and I frankly did not care what was going to happen.  The lone ranger could have been impaled on a spike at the end, and I still would have yawned.  The passion does show (it's clear that Verbinski knows his westerns), and some of the visuals were impressive, but I think the effort should have been more directed towards telling a single good story than to addressing every western and summer action movie cliche.

Rating: D


Bonus - Additional Reading:

In this article from Entertainment Weekly from a while back, Depp explains where he got the inspiration for the look of Tonto in The Lone Ranger.