The crude left-wing propaganda – no more defensible in a supposedly light-hearted kiddie flick than crude right-wing propaganda would be-just adds one more bad movie to the several Verbinski is already juggling with ten butterfingers: an inane buddy Western, a sub-Tarantino revenge flick, a Galahad-on-the-range parody and so on. (It's only seen as a reflection in Reid's eye, but c'mon-six-year-olds will have nightmares anyway.) Most likely, it was at Depp's insistence that The Lone Ranger also includes effed-up scenes dramatizing our extermination of Native Americans, culminating in a massacre when they're shot down by the dozens by a Gatling gun commanded by Barry Pepper as a cavalry officer made up to resemble Custer. In a sincere spirit of warning America's parents off bringing their tykes to the multiplex, "sweet" is one word nobody's going to apply to the 2013 version, starting with the head baddie cutting out and eating someone's innards on-camera.
YOUTUBE THE LONE RANGER SERIES
(One major character's traumatic back story is lifted whole from Leone's great Once Upon a Time in the West.) But what on earth do these stolen-from-my-betters routines have to do with The Lone Ranger? The original 1949-1957 TV series may not rank high in the Western canon or even loom large in most people's memories, but its archaic innocence was sweet. Bits of The Searchers, Red River, High Noon, Shane, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone float by as attractively as used condoms. At times, his cutesy reaction shots remind you of the way old-timey directors used to insert cutaways to the family Scottie covering his eyes with his paws or cocking his ears in perplexity.Īnyone who loves classic Westerns will yawn through spotting everything Verbinski rips off more or less at random. Can Depp possibly be serious when he talks in interviews about the importance to him of The Lone Ranger doing right by Native Americans? His Tonto is a minstrel act, pure and simple. After years of fools like me swearing by Johnny Depp's genius, it's come to this: a 50-year-old being paid millions by Disney to wear Kabuki-for-idiots makeup topped off by a dead bird on his head.
Since we all know who the main attraction is here – and it ain't Armie Hammer in the title role – let's get right to the biggest buffalo chip in sight. The combination of bad slapstick, pretentious Crayola lecturing about white capitalism as the root of all evil, stupid pet tricks and gratuitous brutality is as grotesque a hodgepodge, tone-wise, as any ostensible kiddie treat in years. But most moviegoers will have aged noticeably by then, and not only because Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski's latest lollapalooka is two and a half hours long. Featuring not one but two runaway trains, a humongous bridge, multiple showdowns and a damsel in repeated distress, it's what we paid our money for. The only good thing in The Lone Ranger is the extravagant chase scene at the climax, which is done in just the right comic-heroic spirit.