The Lone Ranger

As I was watching the mediocre but not terrible The Lone Ranger, I was wondering just why Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski's attempt to do for the Western what they did for pirates (in Pirates of the Caribbean) didn't work. This film was a dud at the box office, snuffing out what I'm sure they thought would be another billion-dollar franchise. Instead it became something of a joke, with Johnny Depp wearing a crow on his head.

I'm not really sure. I'm old enough to remember the Lone Ranger TV show, barely, but the kids who wore the mask and yelled "Hiyo, Silver!" while playing in the yard are now collecting social security. But pirates weren't exactly a hot trend when that film came out, so I'm sure the creative team figured lightning could strike twice.

The film is, of course, an origin story. Depp is Tonto, telling a little boy (one of those now in his eighties) the story while working as a "noble savage" at a traveling fair. Some of this is true to the radio show, which began in 1933 (in Detroit, I'm proud to say). John Reid is the only Texas Ranger left alive after an ambush by outlaws, and he and his faithful Indian sidekick get vengeance for his dead brother, taking on a ruthless killer and the railroad baron behind it all.

The film makes some superficial mistakes that are easy to forgive--putting Monument Valley in Texas, or making the actor playing Tonto the real star of the film--but it's hard to put my finger on why it is so lame. Depp plays Tonto much like Jack Sparrow, a kind of Bugs Bunny figure that's always getting in and out of scrapes, and Armie Hammer, as the Ranger, is bland and pretty just like Orlando Bloom was in Pirates. But this film just doesn't have the magic necessary. It's way too long--two and a half hours--and it ways far too long for the payoff, which is the big action sequence set to William Tell's Overture. I'll admit, that got my blood pumping, but there was also a sense of "finally!"

Still, this film is not the atrocity that some have called it. It's lovingly shot--the opening image of San Francisco, with a half-finished Golden Gate bridge, then a pull back of a child letting loose a balloon on a Ferris wheel, is beautiful. I'm a sucker for action sequences on trains, and we get two in this film. And if the film is skewed toward Tonto, at least he gets a much fuller characterization than the old show gave him (Bill Cosby has a routine about how Tonto always got beat up in the radio show).  But overall the film just doesn't work. Maybe it's too meta--there's too much winking at the camera.

I should add that this another film that looks on big business as a villain. This is not new, despite the yammering on business cable channels. Fifty years ago in How the West Was Won the railroads were seen as destroying the way of life for Indians and the buffalo. In our collective psyche, we have tried to right wrongs committed over a hundred years ago, and despite the victories afforded in movies (of course The Lone Ranger defeats the evil railroad baron) the railroad did change the West, putting Indians in reservation and all but wiping out the buffalo.