The Lone Ranger
(2013)
(MILD SPOILERS) Johnny Depp was somewhat disingenuous to suggest that the
critics were responsible for The Lone
Ranger going belly-up. Anyone who has seen a Transformers movie knows they rarely prevent the viewing public from
seeing just what they/we want to see, regardless of presumed quality. But it
raises the question; in a summer wall-to-wall with disappointments (in that, in
almost every case, there was real potential on display that was ultimately
squandered) why did this one get singled out for such venom? It would be overly
dismissive to suggest The Lone Ranger’s
status as a disaster simply became a unfairly repeated meme but I wonder why Pacific Rim has been praised to the
heavens, the corniest Hollywood product in many a year, while Depp and co have
been crucified. Perhaps it’s just their turn.
Which is prelude to saying that I liked The Lone Ranger. I’m quite conscious of its myriad deficiencies,
but some movies refuse to cow to normal critical faculties. We all have them;
some term them guilty pleasures, but I don’t think any of us should feel guilty
for going against the grain. Okay, maybe you should with Norbit. The difficulty comes in trying to defend it if all you can
come up with is “Well, I liked it (shrugs)”. I had this reaction last year with
Prometheus. I can’t disagree with
most of the criticisms I’ve read or heard of that movie. But I still like it,
dammit! In this review I’ll probably mention far more issues I had with The Lone Ranger than things I rated, but
that’s the antithetical nature of such appreciation.
So why did it flop? It’s certainly an argument that the
unchecked hubris of its production, in spite of all the warning signs and
naysaying those who heard about its outrageous price tag (“How could a western
cost so much? It’s insane”), probably needed to borne out by commercial
failure. But it can’t just be put down to bad buzz surrounding it ever since
Disney slammed on the breaks in order to slash the out-of-control budget. It
may not send off great signals to the public at large, but then the similarly
afflicted World War Z has broken the
$500m barrier in gross with the handicap of a similarly engulfing shitstorm.
You could blame the publicity, which was shockingly
formulaic (even the most obviously rousing device, the use of the William Tell
Overture, had to be pre-empted by youtube overdub of the first official
trailer), but that can’t be the whole story.
The readiest explanation is that this is one old property
that remains musty and unattractive even with a lick of new paint. Pirates of the Caribbean had very little
in the way of baggage; it only needed to make people interested in a pirate
movie (and after Cuthroat Island and Pirates, that certainly wasn’t a done
deal), but it could plough it’s own furrow of inventiveness. All that was set
in stone was the title of the Disney ride. The
Lone Ranger is the product of a bygone age, a pre-Batman Batman, and it’s a tough sell in an age where chivalry and
(relative) non-violence is undesirable (and unprofitable; the Dark Knight may
not kill people, but he’ll do everything but). Particularly in the case of the
latter; this is a summer where even Superman snaps someone’s neck. It was only
a year ago that another adaptation of a precursor to the blockbuster age
crashed and burned. Remember John Carter,
the hero whom Star Wars and every
sci-fi fantasy movie hence owed a debt to? It seemed a bit passé (I liked Carter, but it couldn’t feel inspired after
informing all those wunderkinds). This may not bode well for Doc Savage, but if anyone can make it work
it’s Shane Black.
You can see Pirates
regulars Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, and co-scribe Justin Haythe, struggling
with the task of freshening the series’ staple ingredients and not really
succeeding. Tonto's self-conscious "Never
do that again" in response to the "Hi-ho, Silver" signature cry is telling enough that this is a
slightly uncomfortable reimagining. Tonto’s reconfiguration is (mostly) an
anarchic success (as long as you’re on board with Depp doing daffy). But John
Reid’s intentional starchiness only serves to highlight the character’s
antiquatedness. The original show brandished a too-good-to-be true hero in an
idealised, fantasy vision of the Wild West. So it’s understandable that the
writers of the movie opted to transplant his wholesome values to a grittier
environment, one where they are laughably inappropriate. I’m not too concerned
about the perceived insult of making Reid a fake; a law school graduate only
seconded to the Texas Rangers at short notice. The other features of his
genesis are loosely accurate, excepting that he and Tonto first pair up before
his rebirth. It would surely have smacked of the worst of Hollywood’s obsession
with interconnectedness to carry over Tonto and Reid having first encountered
each other as boys (found in the TV show), so it’s no shame to lose that
backstory.
But making Reid a bit of a goof tends to undermine the movie’s
appetite for thrills. You don’t believe in his abilities as a hero, and the
makers indulge in too much repetition. You can only have so many encounters
where he shows off his high moral principles by not killing the bad guy (or
preventing Tonto from killing him), only for said bad guy to escape, before it
becomes a bit wearisome. The writers haven’t put enough effort into varying the
beats in such scenes, and they don’t enable Reid to become the Lone Ranger; we never really feel he’s earned his mask.
Armie Hammer dutifully delivers the performance that is
called of him. Which is the full preppy thing; Hammer must be the most English
public school boy American actor ever anyway, and this will do nothing to
dispel that feeling. He and Depp have an easy sparring chemistry, but he’s
constantly on the back foot (there’s a scene where Reid escapes Helena Bonham
Carter’s brothel by miraculously leaping onto his horse, galloping away and
hoisting Tonto onto the back, and you wonder where this hitherto unseen
dexterity comes from). Hammer’s Ranger is in no way the sorry disaster of
shlubby Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet, but there’s a similar tendency to misjudge
the balance between comedy and heroism.
Also misjudged is the love story, in part because it is
completely superfluous. And a little bad taste. James Badge Dale, who has spent
the last year essaying a series of memorable cameos in major movies, delivers
another as Reid’s brother Dan, the real Texas
Ranger. But, wouldn’t you know it, John and Dan’s wife Rebecca (Luther’s Ruth Wilson in a nothing role
she can do nothing with) were sweethearts when they were younger. It’s not that
their feelings for each other are objectionable, but that their grief for Dan is
forgotten in an instant for the sake of a clichéd clinch (given the conclusion,
it seems an entirely pointless diversion; but hey, they’ve ticked the romance
box). And, while the young whippersnapper playing Rebecca’s son (Bryant Pierce)
gives a reasonable performance, he’s yet another unnecessary character (and
there’s not even a hint of the masterful hero-child bonding we saw earlier this
summer in Iron Man Three).
Of course, if you’re tired of Johnny's shtick (and many seem
to be, or at least those who are, are very vocal about it) The Lone Ranger will do nothing to change your mind. I wouldn’t
even say I’m an apologist for Depp; he can make whatever cartoonish role
choices he wants as far as I’m concerned. Invariably, I’m entertained by the
results. I don’t even begrudge his over-devotedness to Tim Burton (Willy Wonka
is one case where his mugging left me cold, though).
Tonto is more contained, and much less drunk, than Jack
Sparrow; where Jack would indulge in florid verbiage, Tonto’s humour comes from
deadpan brevity. And his unneeded (again!) backstory provides him with a
motivation that Depp et al probably felt distinguished him from being Sparrow
in Monument Valley. But both share an intimacy with the audience, a tendency to
make asides or gestures for our benefit, and most of all an antic disposition
combined with a Keatonesque slapstick dexterity (I particularly like the
business where he exchanges tokens of value as he “robs” the dead). When he
makes John Reid’s life a misery (or drags him through horseshit), mostly you
agree that the Lone Ranger-in making deserves it (if I was partial to the character,
I would probably condemn all this as sacrilegious). Depp’s a master of the
tableau pose, and his reactions result in many of the movie’s high points, be
it beneath trains, atop vertiginous ladders
aboard trains or buried up to his neck. It’s also worth noting that in an
age of steroidal stars he’s an actor who is commendably disinterested in
pumping himself to the max (I mention this only because he spends the movie
stripped to the waist.
There has been a range of discussion over whether Depp
should have taken the role of Tonto, what with his indefinite Native American
ancestry. This has also come up in respect of Keanu and the Christmas release 47 Ronin (but both cases seem like spot-on
casting when sat next to Joel Edgerton playing Ramases in Ridley Scott’s
forthcoming epic-by-numbers Exodus).
I don’t have a strong opinion, either way. I do feel that Depp makes the
character his own and so, because its Depp, Tonto’s traditional broken English
is merely an affectation of his latest cray-zee character. I’m not sure it
would fly if a wholly Native American actor had been cast (but then, this would
be academic as the film wouldn’t have been made). Jay Silverheels, who played
Tonto in the TV series, was not keen on the character’s limited vocabulary.
Understandably, since it lends itself to the “savage” categorisation; Tonto in
the movie is repeatedly referred to in this way, and the makers go to some
lengths to shine a harsh light on the “civilisers” as the real savages.
Indeed, this The Lone
Ranger is quite untempered in expressing rounded disgust for “stupid white men” (just missing the
expletive there to be a direct quote from Depp’s earlier, masterpiece, western Dead Man). For a blockbuster, at any
rate. They are consistently stupid, greedy and/or gutless. There are two westerns in particular that
this movie blatantly draws inspiration from, and one of them is Little Big Man. The Lone Ranger isn’t quite as persistent in lambasting the
genocidal tendencies of the white settlers, partly because it is more unified
in tone and partly because it doesn’t have the polemicised tendencies of Arthur
Penn’s Vietnam era picture. But both movies feature white actors as substitutes
for the Native American viewpoint and both show an undisguised disdain for the
US Cavalry. Verbinski’s montage of the Cavalry’s massacre of a tribe of
attacking Comanches is possibly too-crude a visualisation of the wider destruction
of an entire people and culture, but this is the wrong movie for anything other
than broad strokes.
Barry Pepper’s Captain Fuller makes a stronger impression
than the main villains because he is revealed to be so weak of resolve, and
there’s more than a little of Richard Mulligan’s Custer in Little Big Man to his performance. I found this unrelenting tone largely
commendable, for what is sold as a crowd-pleaser, and it’s the closest any of
the blockbusters this summer has come to a subtext (Star Trek Into Darkness just seemed confused and garbled in its
commentary on the War on Terror). I suspect Depp was acutely aware of the
minefield he was crossing in taking the role, and so used his clout to carry
through this thematic content. The trick
is pulled off is because, through the prism of his cartoon persona you can take
or leave it. But it’s there nonetheless. And even then, it’s surprising that there’s
no hint of apologising or revisionism (unless you want to vilify Depp’s casting),
where you would expect it to be focus-grouped to ineffectuality (indeed, one
plot twist might suggest the writers have gone too far in the opposite
direction).
The Lone Ranger is
also wants to tackle environmental themes, an area it integrates more
successfully into the borderline fantasy tone. The plunder of the landscape for
precious materials, or its wholesale destruction (in the name of
industrialisation and progress) are at the core of the plot. Tonto’s fractured
perspective is a direct result of the influence of European greed. And it’s
this greed that is personified in both outward civility (Tom Wilkinson’s
railroad entrepreneur Cole) and depravity (William Fichtner’s cannibalistic
Butch Cavendish). Silver, the pale horse, comes as a harbinger of a world out
of balance, one where resurrection is required (making Reid a slightly inept Christ
figure) to restore order. The trope of Indian mysticism is generally undercut,
as are clichéd devices such as the wise sage. This is doubtless a good move, as
generally it proves patronising rather than endearing. When it does surface, it tends to reinforce the
film’s central themes and marries with the tonal absurdity rather than feel
forced.
There’s a scene where a colony of cute ickle CGI bunnies
bare pointy teeth and descend carnivorously on a piece of meat it seems
completely random, and the first thing that comes to mind is the buffoonery of
Lucasfilm’s gophers in Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But there’s method to the Verbinski and
co’s madness. To be honest, the film suffers from reining in the preposterous.
The greatest strength of his Pirates
sequels (and I know many would claim there are none) was the willingness to
push the envelope of mainstream movies towards the positively surreal. The
sequence in At World’s End where
Captain Jack is lodged in a hallucinatory purgatory is a piece of unhinged
genius, and Rango has a similar
skewed viewpoint. The Lone Ranger should
have gone further in this direction; if it had, it might have succeeded as a
strange blockbuster brother to Jarmusch’s Dead
Man. (Apparently one of the threads that was cut in the budget wrangling
was the wendigo discussed by Tonto (in reference to Butch); full-blown
werewolves were set to feature, which would have allied the movie even more
with Pirates’ supernatural goings-on.
The were-rabbits, by way of Monty Python,
seem to be a vestige of that.)
A contingent of werewolves might have lent the villains a
bit more edge. Tom Wilkinson is a fine actor, but he struggles to make an
impression with rote villainy. I didn’t find him especially engaging in Batman Begins either. And William
Fichtner is also undercut by the requirements of standard issue malignancy.
It’s difficult for Fichtner not to
steal the show from whoever he’s sharing the screen with. He’s why the opening
of The Dark Knight is so gripping,
and he’s also why Drive Angry is half
watchable. If a film like that, so marginal in intelligence, is able to serve
him a memorable villain, it is all the more disappointing that Butch is defined
by his visual scarring rather than his charisma. Fichtner thrives on roles with
wit and intelligence, and those piercing eyes of his. Douse him under a mountain
of prosthetics and his oozing evil becomes one-note.
Speaking of Fichtner, whose human heart-munching psychopath
is on the unfettered side, I’ve read comments suggesting the level of violence in
what is a 12/PG-13 movie somehow sets a new bar for what those ratings will
allow. I’m not sure that’s true. It’s certainly on the strong side, but it
pulls back from actually showing its scalpings and organ removal (kind of;
Verbinski uses the device of reflected action. Butch’s operation and ingestion are
shown in Reid’s eye. This is something Bond
made a feature of on several occasions). There’s nothing here stronger or more
unsettling than what we see in Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom or The
Dark Knight.
The Lone Ranger’s
biggest problem is that someone needed to stand over Verbinski (or even
earlier, at the script stage) and tell them when to cut. Longer is not always
better, but it seems that neither director nor star learnt from the bloat of
the Pirates sequels. There are points
during the mid section where fatigue sets in, because there is so little to
variation on the release-capture structure. A whole lot of fat that needed
pruning. Wilkinson’s exposition is necessary, but he never comes alive the way
Captain Barbossa does in Pirates. The
sign of a great villain is that you don’t want the camera to cut back to the
hero. This isn’t an issue in The Lone
Ranger. The Pirates films are the
very evidently the template for the movie; a whacky Depp character, an unengaging
love interest for his humourless sidekick, and unnecessarily burdened with
extraneous subplots. Why does Helena Bonham Carter’s brothel madam feature at
all? Although, whilst there’s no need for her, at least she isn't dull. And it’s
fun to see the writers and Verbinski get away with the kind of subversiveness
seen in the quirky fetishisation of her false leg.
Most egregiously unearned is the framing device of an
elderly Tonto reminiscing his heyday. This is also a direct reference to Little Big Man, and it really doesn’t
work. Excise it and you lose a good 10 minutes, which would only have improved
the picture. It doesn’t matter too much at the start but come the third act,
where events are in full swing and there’s a sudden cut back to aged Tonto, it
kills the momentum at exactly the point when it is crucial to pick up the pace;
it’s so wrongheaded, it’s almost as if Verbinski is perversely trying to
sabotage the picture’s chances of success. On occasions, there is a deftness to
the roll back and reframing of a scene (the bank robbery, the dynamiting of the
bridge) but at others it leaves the viewer unsatisfied (I really wanted to see whatever lunatic method Tonto uses to escape
prison). The unreliable narrator device can work well if it is integral to the
concept (The Usual Suspects, Fight Club), and the interrupting
youngster likewise (The Princess Bride)
but here it’s an extra layer of icing that collapses the cake.
But, in spite of all these faults, the main reason I give The Lone Ranger something of a free pass
is Gore Verbinski's visual acumen. It’s also why Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion stands as one of my favourite
movies of the summer, in spite of its flaws. Superficial? Maybe. The Lone Ranger wouldn’t make sense as a
radio play. Verbinski is working with DP Bojan Bazelli for the second time (he
has teamed with Dariusz Wolski on four occasions and Phedon Papamichael twice),
The Ring being their previous
collaboration. Bazelli’s CV doesn’t consist of the most acclaimed of titles,
but Verbinski always extracts the best from his cinematographers. Every frame
of The Lone Ranger is gorgeous. His
flair is so abundant that it barely merits mention, when another director would
reap the plaudits. Also, and this can’t be understated in a world where The Hobbit ends up with more faking
looking CGI than The Lord of the Rings
featured a decade earlier, he has a singular ability to integrate effects with
live action. I say singular; there are a few out there who know their craft
(Kosinski is one, Roland Emmerich another), but it’s a rarity to see pixels rendered
with such depth and weight that you’re barely aware that’s all they are.
So it’s true to say Verbinski is one of my favourite visual
stylists working today. And he is the master of the effortless set piece. The
giddy juggling act of competing trains recalls the whirlpool acrobatics of the
rather exhausting climax of At World’s
End, only more engaging. But runaway trains bookend the picture, and I
think the opener is the more successful (actually, I may revise this when I
revisit the movie; it may just be that after two and a half hours it had its
work cut out in reengaging me). The finale definitely benefits enormously from
the use of the William Tell Overture, a signature as definitive as the Bond theme and one you can’t help but
conclude Hans Zimmer should have woven liberally into the score.
Zimmer is Verbinski’s regular composer and, despite this
lapse, they ensure the soundtrack is a pleasurably referential experience. Zimmer
has always been a bit patchy for me, prone to filling in scores by numbers when
he isn’t pushed. Occasionally he would come up with something truly beautiful (The Thin Red Line) but it’s only in the
past couple of years that he’s found directors who willing to specifically
guide, and challenge, him in what they want. The results (the scores for The Dark Knight, Inception and Sherlock Holmes)
have been some of his best. I wouldn’t put The
Lone Ranger in that league; there’s too much homaging for it to strike out
on its own. He takes his cues as much from his Holmes scores as from Ennio Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone
(appropriate, as Verbinski makes this the most sumptuous western since Leone’s
operatic peak period). The building of the railroad sequence overtly homages Once Upon a Time in the West both
visually and aurally.
Usually in a Johnny Depp movie, Depp is the unquestionable
star. But on this occasion the animal cast may have supplanted him. Alive,
dead, or digitally rendered, the creatures here walk, run or flop about with
the comedy laurels. I’ve mentioned the fearsome rabbits, but also featured area
slew of CGI scorpions (whose threat is surmounted by another animal force). Dead
creatures prove no less animated. Tonto’s dead crow is fed grain in a running
gag that doesn’t quite come off, but its comic highlight comes when it gets
shot. Then there’s the threat of violation by duck’s foot. Peerless amongst
this menagerie is Tonto himself (“Something
very wrong with that horse”), who sits in trees and saunters up to rescue
our heroes just in the nick off time. More mysteriously, I could have sworn I
saw a man with the head of a bison in HBC’s brothel.
There have been rumours that, following The Lone Ranger’s tanking, the once titanic Jerry Bruckheimer is
being pushed to the fringes of the upcoming Pirates
5. It wouldn’t surprise me too greatly. On the one hand, his status as one
of the few remaining “star” producers has ensured that those he supports are
shepherded and protected in their projects. On the other, the tendency for his
pictures to be less and less disciplined has become marked. A decade ago he was
bringing two or three projects a year to the screen; now one would be pushing
it. He also turns 70 this year, and there’s a point where even a dynamo begins
to wind down.
I'm not really surprised at the slating The Lone Ranger has received, and I can’t actively mount a spirited
riposte because I can see where the criticisms are coming from. If you didn't
like the last couple of Pirates of the
Caribbeans you definitely won't be won over, but it feels a little arbitrary
that this has been so damned and blasted. The
Lone Ranger is no more artistically and narratively problematic than some
of the more garlanded success stories of the past summer. Like its Pirates predecessors, its ideal medium is
likely to be the home entertainment market, where unwieldy length can turn from
a hindrance to an assistance. It’s an irony of Verbinski’s career that he is so
attached to spectacle yet his pictures tend to work better on the small screen.
One thing’s certain; a sequel’s out.
***1/2
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