In this “Lone Ranger,” we don’t hear the loudest signifier of all, the iconic theme music, till nearly the end, when it trumpets an exciting, utterly absurd final action sequence, in which the Ranger himself, theretofore a clueless pill, finally comes into his own as a galloping hero. If the teenager sitting next to me is at all typical of his cohort, all those Lone Ranger signifiers-the mask, the white horse and white hat, “Kemosabe,” Tonto’s verbless grammar-are dada-ishly amusing but unresonant. It’s a clever device, but 1933 was a long time ago, too. A small boy in cowboy suit and mask lingers at a carnival sideshow, where an aged Indian in a dusty diorama comes to life, turns out to be none other than Tonto, and tells the story.
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Depp and the filmmakers rather cleverly try to obviate this problem by framing the action, which takes place in the late eighteen-sixties, as a flashback from 1933. After that, not much: a couple of forgettable movies, a cheesy animated series, some comic books.Ī good many of the new movie’s jokes depend on a working knowledge of Lone Ranger lore, which is apt to be sketchy if you were born sometime in the last half-century.
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“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty Hiyo Silver, away!” The duo were on black-and-white TV from 1949 to 1956, with the excellently named Jay Silverheels as Tonto. The masked man and his faithful Indian companion were on the radio, where I first encountered them, from 1933 to 1956. To like the 2013 “Lone Ranger,” it also helps to be d’un certain âge. In any case, without him, this “Lone Ranger” would have been soulless and mirthless. My guess is that Depp’s Tonto is a meld of Buster Keaton, George Burns, and Kiss. People magazine has fingered Marilyn Manson, at whose concerts Depp has occasionally made surprise appearances on guitar. He hasn’t said where he got his Tonto from. His Jack Sparrow, in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, was modelled-famously, explicitly-on Keith Richards. He’s a clever magpie when it comes to looking around for shards to assemble his characters from. He has saved worse movies than this one (e.g., “Dark Shadows”). If you’re going to fall for “The Lone Ranger,” it helps to be, like me, a fan of Johnny Depp’s particular talent for weirdness.
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And on the rare occasions when a sensibility like, say, Ang Lee’s mobilizes all that skill and craft and technology to make a movie like, say, the 3-D “Life of Pi,” the art that results is high indeed. Yet there’s more beauty-more artistry, even-in a movie like “The Lone Ranger” (or, for that matter, in movies like “Despicable Me 2,” “Superman,” and the 3-D version of “Transformers 3”) than in a decade of Whitney Biennials. They’re about high spirits, not high art.
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The real creators of movies like these, as much as the directors, screenwriters, and stars, are the hundreds of designers, programmers, animators, technicians, and the like, whose names keep rolling by in small letters against black backgrounds long after the patrons have left the theatre. Like a good many such exercises in Hollywood gigantism in this bright dawn of the age of C.G.I., when almost anything that can be imagined can be portrayed, “The Lone Ranger” overflows with astounding, astoundingly detailed visual spectacle. Still, the interludes of sadism, murder, and genocidal mass slaughter are jarring in a movie whose main point is to have fun.īut there are plenty of things right with it, too-more than enough to reward a couple of hours in the dark. By the loose moral standards of twenty-first-century moviemaking, its individual scenes of violence are on the mild side, in that fountains of arterial blood and heads exploding in clouds of pink mist are mostly abjured. It’s basically a comedy, but the whiplash induced by its sudden, rapid, and repeated transitions between gags and gore is severe. There are plenty of things wrong with it, of course. Really, though, “The Lone Ranger” deserves better. Audiences in places like China don’t generally embrace Westerns with the same enthusiasm they lavish on alien invasions, sci-fi franchises, teen wizards, zombies, and superheroes, especially when the cowboys aren’t even in 3-D. (“Despicable Me 2” clocks in at seventy-nine.) What to do? Industrial-scale megamovies often look to foreign markets to indemnify themselves against domestic doldrums, but that hope appears wan in this case. The critics, including ours, have not been especially kind to “The Lone Ranger.” On ’s Tomatomer, it rates a paltry twenty-six out of a hundred. (“Despicable Me 2,” by contrast, grossed half its production cost over that same weekend.)
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It’s going to be a long, steep climb to the break-even mark. Fifty mil may sound like boffo bux to you and me, but “The Lone Ranger” cost roughly a third of a billion dollars to make and market.