In a video interview with Armie Hammer, the Australian interviewer right.described The Lone Ranger as ‘the craziest movie of the year!
It’s been over fifty years since The Lone Ranger was a hit TV show but Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are hoping to end that streak with a vivid, hellbent for leather reimagining that veers crazily from comedy to action to tragedy and back again.
Some of the details have changed (Tonto is a Comanche; John Reid is the newly appointed town prosecutor who worships the law), but the basic story – the lone survivor of the ambush slaying of a troop of Texas Rangers dons a mask and seeks justice – remains the same.
Reid (Armie Hammer) first encounters Tonto (Johnny Depp) on a train heading to his new job when Butch Cavendish’s (William Fichtner) gang frees him from a prison car and terrorizes the train’s passengers. Reid finds himself shackled next to the peculiar Cherokee – a situation that sets up their eventual partnership by contrasting Reid’.’ He is s belief in civilization and law with Tonto’s combination of pragmatism and peculiarity.
In town, Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) is helping celebrate his company’s completion of the railroad and trying to ingratiate himself with Rebecca Reid (Ruth Wilson) and her son Danny (Bryant Prince) without success. When Reid arrives, we learn that she is married to his brother Dan (James Badge Dale), a Texas Ranger – and he finds himself deputized and part of the group of Rangers who set out to recapture Cavendish.
Seven of the Rangers are gunned down in an ambush and found soon after by Tonto, who buries them. Thanks to a surprisingly intelligent white horse, though, he finds himself partnered up with Reid (we are left to wonder if the ‘spirit horse’ actually brought Reid back from the dead, or if he was merely wounded and unconscious) – not his choice, he’d have preferred Dan. Which leads to an entirely new take on Kemo Sabe.
Part of the movie’s fun is watching Tonto – who is clearly more aware of the reality of things (for all that he believes in spirit horses and such) and pragmatic than the idealistic Reid – continue to make his point in spite of Reid’s refusal to adapt. Depp plays Tonto with a quiet dignity and laconic wit mixed with a bit of classic slapstick. He speaks English like the second language that it is – a kind of pidgeon mixed with occasional bursts of perfection that suggests he might be playing with Reid in more than one way.
The humor varies between witty observation and goofy slapstick – a sequence with two trains in the last act is a marvel of the later; Tonto’s wry observations – including his thoughts on the white horse that becomes Reid’s mount – are among the former.
Director Gore Verbinski has taken a wild script by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio and created a whirlwind of a film that mixes adventure, comedy and drama in ways that really shouldn’t fit but do, anyway. Even when an unlikely madam named Red Harrington (Helena Burton Carter) – she has a prosthetic leg made of ivory that (in a Tarantino/Rodriguez homage, conceals a shotgun) appears, it doesn’t feel like she was shoehorned into an overstuffed movie (though it is and she was).
Carnage (like the ambush) is sandwiched between comical sequences; characters are – with the exception of the leads – sketched in rather broadly, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There’s so much going on that occasional cuts to the clever framing sequence – an aged Tonto is telling his story to a little boy in cowboy gear (complete with mask) in a carnival sideshow – give us a chance to chance to catch our breath and wonder whether the whole thing is a fantasy.
Enough of his story feels honest – he acknowledges that an incident involving a couple of evil brothers in his youth left him ‘broken’ – that it can’t just be written off. But how much is embroidery? Does it matter?
There are, occasionally, films that might be flawed but create an experience that renders them irrelevant. The Lone Ranger is one of those films. It’s a big raucous ride that makes its two-and-a-half hour running time seem like far less. As one bit of proof, I offer the fact that I had a full third of my soda pop left as the final credits rolled. Clayton Moore would have approved of this movie.
Final Grade: A
Photos by /Courtesy Walt Disney Studios