Photo courtesy Disney Pictures
(This is not the official poster, but it uses the same image, so I figured it was close enough 😉
I don’t know what people are complaining about with this movie. This thing has 25% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and I can’t see why 75% of reviewers hated this movie THAT MUCH. (I looked up the stat, but I didn’t read ANY reviews prior to writing my own.)
What People May Not Like
It is a little slow at times. The story and scenes tend to drag, especially in the outdoor, landscape scenes that are supposed to showcase the isolation or the beauty of the region. BUT: I expect a slowness to western movies. It’s part of the reason I don’t watch many of them. So, while I noticed that it was slow, it wasn’t overly distracting or frustrating.
The “romance” element, if you can even call it that, was weak, at best. I wasn’t smitten with Ruth Wilson, she was supposed to be a strong female character in the West, John Reid’s (aka the Lone Ranger) former love, and it just didn’t play. It may sound mean, but she wasn’t pretty enough, she wasn’t hardcore enough, and she wasn’t the kind of woman you really want to see the guy get together with at the end. She wasn’t terrible, but I just didn’t feel any chemistry between her and the Lone Ranger, and I didn’t see anything beyond a feeble attempt at moxie from her.
Johnny Depp as Tonto. No, he’s not a Native American. Maybe it might seem offensive, like someone putting on blackface, for such an iconic role. But you know what? He’s Johnny fucking Depp. He has what it takes to take on an iconic role, no matter which one, and make it believable. I thought he was wonderful. He was quirky, funny, and really entertaining.
Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger: he was a little cheesy, but from my understand, the Lone Ranger was a little cheesy. The movie shows the transition of John Reid as a district attorney into the outlaw/enforcer The Lone Ranger, and Reid is a bit of a pansy, a little weak. Tonto calls him “Kimosabe,” which he tells him means “wrong brother”, because he thought that Reid’s brother Dan was the warrior, the strong one, the righteous one who would help him get justice for his tribe. I thought Hammer improved as the movie went on, and I think it was a natural progression from a by-the-book lawman to a do-what-it-takes outlaw.
The soundtrack: I thought it was a little lackluster. It seemed like music that had been recycled from a couple other epics and westerns, and it was noticeably familiar rather than distinctive. The only distinctive music was the Lone Ranger theme song that wasn’t played until the final big action scene (which went on for a very long time), but it was fun. Familiar in a good way at that point.
I think the biggest fail was having Gore Verbinski direct. I thought the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was running out of steam after the FIRST one, and now to give him a new franchise for him to squeeze the life out of seems irresponsible. He didn’t do a bad job (I think Baz Luhrmann did worse with Gatsby than Verbinski did with Ranger), but he’s not really familiar with the genre, and I don’t think he was able to do it justice.
Why I liked it
I really can’t understand why people hated this movie, unless they’re comparing it to the folklore and original television show. I wouldn’t know much about whether the movie stayed true to any of it, so maybe I’m able to be gentler on the film for that reason.
I thought the villains were great, and the protagonists were great. Tom Wilkinson is always a good bad guy. He has that sort of voice that can strike fear, and he has a presence that makes you believe he’s the type of guy who would do anything to get what he wants. And William Fichtner was truly terrifying. He’s usually more of a neurotic, comic relief type of character (to my mind, anyway), and to see him play a really ugly, horrible example of a human being was a lot of fun to watch. He really was bad to the bone, and while it was a little cliche at times, I feel that’s another trait of the Western genre that I’m not going to count against this movie.
The chemistry between Hammer and Depp was hard to put a finger on at first, because they disliked each other so much, and the Lone Ranger spent so much of the first part of the movie trying to put Tonto back in jail, but it shone through toward the end and especially their comic banter made it a real “buddy” type of movie.
Probably one of my favorite performances was Helena Bonham Carter’s as a madam of a whorehouse with a prosthetic leg made of ivory that is fully loaded, literally. She usually plays a villain or an antagonist of some kind, but here, she was on the side of the “good guys”. I felt like she was much more the solid, strong female character than Ruth Wilson’s Rebecca Reid. Yeah, she may have been a prostitute, but I felt like her role contributed much more to the plot and the entertainment of the movie than Rebecca’s. Well done.
I saw the movie Thursday morning after it came out (Wednesday), and the theater was pretty well packed. I enjoyed the movie, and the people in the theater with me that really enjoyed it, I daresay even more than I did. They applauded at the end, and they laughed all the way through. Because of that, it makes me think the critics were a little too harsh on it. It may not be the film of the decade or an Oscar nominee or anything, but it’s an entertaining, fun for the family kind of movie, and I think the critics did movie-goers a disservice by turning them away from a movie that many of them would have likely enjoyed.
(I skimmed a couple reviews after writing mine, just to see what all the complaints were about, and I think I outlined them pretty well in the “What People May Not Like” section. If you can get past that stuff, preferably to the things I mention in the “Why I liked it” section, I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t enjoy it, too.)
I’m saying 3 stars because it did have its flaws, but it was still fun and enjoyable overall. I would give it 3.5 stars, but I don’t do half stars on this blog, and I think 4 stars would be overstating it. In any case, I think if you like Johnny Depp, if you like Westerns, and if you like the Lone Ranger TV series, I think you’d have fun at this movie.
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