Movie Review: The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger (2013)

Native American warrior Tonto recounts the untold tales that transformed John Reid, a man of the law, into a legend of justice.  Short synopsis of The Lone Ranger taken from IMDb/com

Won't bother too much with this one.  To be honest, I more listened to The Lone Ranger than I  actually watched it.  I lost interest after the train crash near the beginning.  There is a part of that scene where a giant steel appendage from the overturned locomotive snaps off and impales itself between our two would-be heroes, and then stops the sliding vehicle from crushing the two guys against an over-turned boxcar.  I thought to myself "It's gonna be one of those movies," and returned my primary attention to the model airplane I was working on (Christmas vacation 2013/2014 was the the winter break of model airplanes... yes, I'm a geek).

Lone Ranger seemed to take itself too seriously sometimes, and at other times it seemed very much in love with its source material, and yet at the same time, not understanding it.  Take the end of the film... please (the old jokes never really die, do they?)!  It is filled with toss offs to the Lone Ranger serial program.  Not that I've ever really seen that, but I get the idea of melodrama and hokey action.  The damsel in distress, the horse chase on top of the train, the almost slapstick nature of the fighting.  Although I did like Jonny Depp's riding that ladder (what'd they need a ladder that long for, anyway?) from one train to another and calmly stepping off just as the ladder is disintegrated into kindling by hitting a tree.

The Lone Ranger and Tanto, from the 1950s TV serial.  It starred Clayton Moore as titular ranger, and Jay Silverheels as his faithful sidekick.  I vaguely recall seeing re-runs of this show on TV when I was a little scrap, but it must have been rare even then, since this would be the early 1980s I'm speaking of. / Source: screenrant.com

And why did we have two trains running side by side?  No, no, I remember it's a movie.  OK.  But then we get Tanto saying "I used to think you were a wendigo (spirit creature monster), but you are just another White man (paraphrased, I think).  The heavy-hand of the poor Native Americans, and while we're at it, shame on you rich white men for picking on them!  It's all here, just as it is in any politically correct (make sure the political is there in that breath, or you are way off, and I'll explain myself, so don't lynch my blog just yet) movie has these days.

Still there?  Well what I mean is, it is "P.C." to beat up on the bad white guys who were so hard on the poor Indians these days.  And yes, that is justifiable in many ways.  The characters portrayed aren't too much askew from what often happened at the time.  The problem is, we can't say the white men were all bad guys and the Indians were all just minding their own business.  That'd be silly.  There were atrocities on both sides.  Yes, the white people came in and made the problem, so that is their fault.  But sadly, most of them didn't know any better.  And neither did the Natives, who did some pretty barbaric things to people when they had the chance.  It was what they knew.  We sit back in an age when such things are easy to construe as barbaric and say, "how dreadful."  But if we were in  their shoes, with what these people knew, we'd have probably not been able to do a whole lot better.

The action in Lone Ranger is pretty cool, but it's no "The Great Train Robbery."  That 1903 film is pretty tame by our standards, but when you take into consideration that they were doing stuff that wasn't so cliche as to be ludicrous (2013's Lone Ranger, I'm looking your way again), then it was really pretty amazing.  Plus, nice touch having Justus D. Barnes shooting at the camera in the final scene.  That dude looks like a rustler! / Source: Wikipedia.org

OK, soap box done.  Revisionist history has been tilted at.  My Don Quixote fix has been achieved.  Moving on.

The Lone Ranger was mildly amusing, but for me personally, it wasn't even worth the Redbox rental.  I didn't hate it, per-se.  But it just didn't do anything for me. Depp is fun, but he is always the same person playing different variations of himself (like I have complained about three times today now, in my notes - see my reviews on Elysium and The Internship).  The titular character, Armie Hammer, was certainly agreeable in his performance, but in all seriousness, anybody could have played him.  The story was interesting, but devolved into silliness, as is de rigueur for this type of summer blockbuster with roots in melodramatic cowboy drama of yesteryear.  In the end, I could have not seen it and been just fine.  Take that for what it is worth.

The parting comment:



Source: LOLSnaps.com

The Lone Ranger must have had lots of money to throw around, with all those CGI effects and big explosions and costumes and paying Mr. Depp's salary and all.  But I'd bet it didn't have a budget as big as the image above.  I'd take just one of those pallets.  And I wouldn't even complain about having to transport it or store it or anything.  Honest!