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IMMEDIATE REACTION: What does it mean that while only 26 percent of critics on Rotten Tomatoes\u2019 scale approved of this movie, 68 percent of audiences have so far liked what they saw? Probably nothing. Maybe everything.<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s way too long \u2013 as are so many big-studio blockbusters intent on showing every single dollar spent on screen. It\u2019s at times a tad too pleased with itself, especially in the way it blatantly samples from so many other (better) movies from Little Big Man<\/em> to The General<\/em> (lots and lots from The General,<\/em> in fact, given all those intersecting locomotives) to the collected works of Sergio Leone, Steven Spielberg and even its own director Gore Verbinski. And while it\u2019s far more respectful towards indigenous Americans than you might believe, you still wonder why they all\u2026well, I wouldn\u2019t want to give too much away even if you have no intention whatsoever of seeing The Lone Ranger<\/em>. And a lot of you don\u2019t, I\u2019m sure, based on its overwhelmingly negative reviews and its underwhelming box-office results thus far.<\/p>\n That bad odor followed me into a bargain matinee of Lone Ranger <\/em>this week. I couldn\u2019t help it, being of a certain age wherein I cut my teeth on the 1950s Clayton Moore-Jay Silverheels TV series, devoured the legend\u2019s crudely captivating mid-1960s animated TV version<\/a> and was as recently as a year ago pulling people\u2019s coats about Brett Matthews and Sergio Cariello\u2019s controversial graphic (in every sense of the word) novel <\/a>which steeped the creaky old mythos in oily western noir. I had to see for myself how bad the movie was and as I watched, I kept waiting for it to start getting as irredeemably awful as everybody warned me it would. It never happened.<\/p>\n In fact, for all of its problems, The Lone Ranger<\/em> turns out to be a buoyant, insouciantly subversive ragbag epic. As only a few others besides me have noted, <\/a>even the aforementioned samples from other movies contribute to Lone Ranger<\/em>\u2019s fun-house distortions of both frontier mythology and popular culture. Yes, it conspicuously takes on the trappings of a gimmicky action blockbuster with a campy Johnny Depp star turn jury-rigged to draw in those who unconditionally loved the last couple of gimmicky action blockbusters with a campy Johnny Depp star turn. But the movie subjects its own motives and methods to constant scrutiny and, in hit-and-miss fashion, weaves this self-awareness into the narrative with goofball nonchalance. It\u2019s every bit the arch, intricately designed feature-length cartoon that the Verbinski-Depp collaboration, Ringo<\/em> (2011) was, only with more flesh, blood and gore, so to speak. If this version had come out back in 1981, instead of that misbegotten, deservedly forgotten The Legend of the Lone Ranger<\/em>, it might have been seen as a genre-transforming breakthrough. Now, it\u2019s just a big fat Hollywood summer movie that seemed destined for cautionary-tale status even before it opened.<\/p>\n I wonder why. Just about every summer preview I\u2019d seen this past spring seemed to be spraying Lone Ranger<\/em> with bad juju. And, as always, the pundits were more concerned with the packaging than with whatever was inside the box. Why, they wondered, dredge up an eighty-something-year-old radio serial that no one under 50 (maybe, more like 55) knows or cares about? The fact that Disney brought back the \u201cteam\u201d that gave a grateful world the Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em> trilogy \u2013 which, to this viewer, was at least a movie-and-a-half more than the world needed \u2013 seemed to some more like a cynical money-grubbing gesture than a calculated gamble; as if the Giant Mouse was desperately reaching back to \u201cthose thrilling days of yesteryear\u201d for its theme parks\u2019 Next Big Thing (though, having seen the movie, I\u2019m damned if I can figure out what thrill ride the company\u2019s going to get out of this one.)<\/p>\n There was also an undercurrent of Depp Fatigue in these advance warnings. In this age of gnat-wing attention spans, the air was buzzing with whispers that Johnny Depp\u2019s high-concept dress-ups were getting thin and (more to the point) less lucrative. Last year\u2019s Dark Shadows<\/em> applied a coup de grace to the idea of Depp\u2019s outrageousness carrying a movie along. His Barnaby Collins was a blissfully, sometimes poignantly realized reboot. But you kept waiting in vain for the rest of the movie to get better \u2013 or get moving. So one imagines the long knives were unsheathed for this Depp turn, especially since he had the cheek to assume the role of Tonto, the title character\u2019s Native American companion. Geez, why not the Lone Ranger? After all, he\u2019s\u2026you know\u2026and you\u2019re\u2026like\u2026and Tonto\u2026He\u2019s\u2026Oh jeez, this is SO awkward\u2026.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going to spend too much time and space here unpacking this issue in all its historical and cultural permutations \u2013 and don\u2019t you start with me either. But in the first place, why in the name of John Reid WOULD Depp choose to play the Lone Ranger? Even in the graphic novel, Reid is a decent, dashing fellow who, despite his patrician polish and random knowledge of small firearms, science and anatomy, is the biggest cube in the icebox. Arnie Hammer\u2019s been taking knocks for being a bland, toothy cipher. But that\u2019s what the Masked Man essentially is \u2013 and also what Verbinski\u2019s movie chooses to emphasize. Hammer\u2019s just fine in the role; though he does at times betray a level of embarrassment with the hissy fits the movie requires him to toss, especially at Depp\u2019s Tonto, whose reinvention here as both sham and shaman, as trickster and bumbler, as sleazy sidekick and alpha dog, should be lauded rather than castigated. It\u2019s certainly an improvement over the kind of routine abuse Bill Cosby once cited<\/a> in the second all-time best Lone Ranger shtick by a stand-up comic. (This,<\/a> of course, is the first.)<\/p>\n And sure, it would have been wonderful for Disney and company to seek out a Native American actor who could bring to this Tonto the kind of comedic timing, deadpan agility and glam-rock swagger that made Depp a star. But we don\u2019t live in that world now. (We should, but we never did and likely won\u2019t in the foreseeable future because trees are smarter, braver and more imaginative than most of the bean counters running the movie industry these days.) As he did with Barnaby Collins and, to a lesser extent, with Willy Wonka, Depp inhabits not just a pop-culture figment of somebody else\u2019s imagination, but our own tangled presumptions about that character to the point where he can upend, shatter and remake those presumptions to his own eccentric specifications. Put another way, it\u2019s hard to think of Depp\u2019s Tonto as red or white (not even with that threadbare makeup cracking and peeling before our eyes.) He\u2019s the stone-faced imp in our collective memory bank, rewiring a hallowed, if anachronistic pop myth so emphatically that even that Kemosabe cube has to rethink his heretofore tidy value system. Also, how can anyone say this Lone Ranger<\/em> maintains the hierarchical status quo when just about every one of its pale male characters, especially its eponymous hero-savant, comes across as some variant of a \u201cstupid white man\u201d?<\/p>\n This won\u2019t mitigate the carping and it shouldn\u2019t. Just like it shouldn\u2019t have taken 145 minutes to make an entertaining western adventure-spoof. (Blazing Saddles<\/em> clocks in at 93 minutes; even The Mask of Zorro<\/em> managed to maintain a brisk, eye-filling pace at 136 minutes, complete with set pieces.) Half the plot strands, even the slingshot-wielding kid who is maybe the Green Hornet\u2019s grandfather, could have been dispensed with. But more not less is, as noted, the profile Hollywood insists upon for action movies. Verbinski\u2019s movie can\u2019t help but resemble a mammoth popcorn spectacle given the global market demands. The real fatigue Lone Ranger<\/em> represents isn\u2019t with Johnny Depp or even with westerns, though this movie\u2019s perceived failure may have further pushed back the genre\u2019s dim prospects for resuscitation. It\u2019s with the hidebound hot-air chatter over summer tent-poles and trillion-dollar spectacles. If the two guys most responsible for initiating this era of movies now foresee its demise<\/a>, then the timing for Lone Ranger<\/em> Redux is even worse. This version should have been made at least thirty years sooner. It could be another twenty years before we can say for sure whether it’s bad or good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" IMMEDIATE REACTION: What does it mean that while only 26 percent of critics on Rotten Tomatoes\u2019 scale approved of this movie, 68 percent of audiences have so far liked what they saw? Probably nothing. Maybe everything. It\u2019s way too long \u2013 as are so many big-studio blockbusters intent on showing every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[293,294,292,291,290,288,289],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-2013-summer-movies","tag-arnie-hammer","tag-disney","tag-gore-verbinski","tag-johnny-depp","tag-lone-ranger","tag-tonto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3264,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/3264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}