With its abysmal 25 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, I was expecting Disney’s The Lone Ranger to be a disaster. Which is too bad, I was looking forward to it because it looked like a fun action movie. It’s a mediocre movie but despite the ambush by critics, it’s not that bad. Regardless of some tedious stretches and painful comedy, the movie has some decent action and it’s passably entertaining.
The film is essentially an origin story of the Lone Ranger, aka John Reid (Armie Hammer), and his Native American sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp, who ironically has more screen time) and how they came to be. The film opens with an unnecessary introduction in 1933 San Francisco, where an elderly Tonto in a traveling circus tells a young boy the Lone Ranger’s story from his point-of-view. The movie occasionally flashes back to this, an approach I found very distracting.
For a movie that is titled The Lone Ranger, there is a lot of focus on his companion Tonto. Johnny Depp is the biggest star in the movie after all. But really, who is Armie Hammer? Wasn’t he in that Social Network movie? He was? All right, anything else of importance? No? Whatever, Depp as usual gets top billing. A side note on casting, Helena Bonham Carter is also in this movie, and this is probably the first time that she and Depp are in the same movie and Tim Burton is not involved. Depp does his usual quirky mugging schtick that he has honed to perfection, like in the ‘Pirates’ movies that are also from the same director, Gore Verbinski, but it gets really old. It is also worth noting that Verbinski and Depp collaborated on the 2011 Oscar winning animated film “Rango,” which was also a Western, and quite superior to this film. Worse than Depp’s repetitive character, Hammer is as bland as the Lone Ranger and he doesn’t have much to do in the movie, which is a shame.
The movie doesn’t really hit its stride till the end, where there is an admittedly pretty exciting train chase. Hans Zimmer’s exciting score complement the action perfectly. In fact, the score is better than the movie itself. If the movie would have trimmed the fat, such as the stupid humor, the tedious stretches and the 1930’s stuff, it would have been a stronger movie. Rent it if you must see it.
