The Lone Ranger (2013)

In order for a movie to accomplish anything significant, it has to know what it wants to be. It can’t just throw tones and ideas at the screen for 150 minutes and expect the end result to have an ounce of coherence. This is ultimately the greatest sin committed by Gore Verbinski’s blockbuster western The Lone Ranger, and at its worst it feels like two different types of summer movies fighting for superiority. One moment it’s a dark, violent film that deals with ostensibly serious issues, and the next it wants us to laugh at a white horse in a tree wearing a cowboy hat. It’s been a while since a movie has gone from broad to brutal quite this often and this carelessly. Verbinski is a technically skilled director that can handle a lot of individual moments well, but as was the case with his later Pirates films, The Lone Ranger gets so carried away that it too often goes off the rails.

Armie Hammer is John Reid, a Texas lawyer whose focus on academics is looked down upon by his Ranger brother Dan (James Badge Dale). After the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) escapes from custody, Dan brings John along to hunt him down. Their hunt reaches an unfortunate end when all the Rangers are ambushed and killed, but when the oddball Native American Tonto (Johnny Depp) happens across their bodies, a white spirit horse shows up and asks that John be revived. Or whatever. Once John comes back to life, he and Tonto team up to solve a conflict that involves Cavendish, the railroad honcho Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), Dan’s widow (Ruth Wilson), and many more. There is much gunplay and subsequent mugging for the camera.

Hammer and Depp are thankfully quite good in their respective roles, or else The Lone Ranger might have wound up being completely interminable. Despite the constant whiplash, it is still a very watchable film, and that says a lot for the talent of the people involved. I think Verbinski also has a lot going for him, but he’s also got a knack for piling excess on top of excess to the point of exhaustion. I definitely like his aesthetic here, and he quite skillfully integrates practical and CGI effects, but as far as content is concerned he hurts himself by not focusing in on a single thesis statement. His brain definitely likes to meander, and while that sometimes added to the charm of the Pirates films it doesn’t quite add up in The Lone Ranger.

Verbinski also has a particular knack for stuffing his blockbusters to the gills, and this 149-minute film is no exception. This is exemplified in a framing device which seems like a zero at the outset and goes precisely nowhere. (This is quite the summer of useless framing devices, eh, Great Gatsby?) It’s literally an example of a character recounting the story to another character, and that structure adds no intrigue or anything to the content. It just fills time that doesn’t need to be filled. A framing device like the one here needs to lead up to some kind of twist or have some significant impact on how the audience interprets the story. Imagine watching a movie with an elderly relative who constantly pauses it and asks for an update as to what’s going on. Thus is the effect of the framing device in The Lone Ranger.

Stopping and starting the story like that only serves to illuminate the clumsiness of the film as a whole. As is so often the case with $200+ million epics with production troubles, The Lone Ranger is another movie that feels like the result of too many hands touching the dish before its served to the public. It is not rare for a big movie like this to go through several writers. The key is having the film not feel like it’s been through too many writers. Verbinski and company do not pull this off. The Lone Ranger is definitely a superficially entertaining work with several scenes that actually are able to transcend the rest of the package. In particular, much of the action is legitimately exciting. Even so, this does not make up for the shortcomings seen in the rest of the material. All the pieces are here for a logical follow-up to the Pirates franchise, but before it takes the next step there's a serious identity crisis that needs to be addressed.

Grade: C+