The Lone Ranger hits blu-ray on December 17th from Disney.
A major goal for me as a critic is to, as much as possible, evaluate a film on its own merits. To that end, I often avoid reading other reviews or editorials about a film until I see it for myself. Fandom came first, though, and I will often indulge my anticipation by watching a trailer or reading about a film’s development and production. And try as I might (which is not that hard), I can’t really avoid getting pulled into seeing what people in the industry are saying about a film on social media, if even in only 140 characters.
I note this because I absolutely plan to throw all of that out the window as I review The Lone Ranger. I read a dozen reviews of the film, not the least of which was our own Wilson Smith’s defense of the film upon its theatrical release. I read up on the box office failure, the troubled production, and the critical drubbing. There is simply no way I was going to be able to watch this film in a vacuum by the time I popped the blu-ray into my player to take it all in for myself.
But you know what, I liked The Lone Ranger!
I can’t deny that the venture was ill-advised, too expensive, and that it has a number of significant issues in story, tone, and character. But personally, I found all of the issues beyond the casting of Johnny Depp as Tonto to be middling, or at the very least, to not detract so much from the whole as to condemn the film to badness.
About that Depp casting. My understanding is that Depp claims a significant fraction of Native heritage in his ancestry. So it seems clear to me that he and the entire production team felt that their film’s overarching themes exposing the government’s duplicitous treatment of Natives would overshadow the “brown face” casting. I think their hearts were in the right place. I really do. But while I don’t think Depp’s casting was a full on affront, it is also something we genuinely need to get past here in 2013. Minority actors need every role they can get, and unless satire is involved, or some kind of biting political commentary, I think it’d be best if we went ahead and cast at LEAST real minorities in the roles of minority characters. Beyond that, I think more minority actors need to be getting lead roles and roles not specifically written for minorities, but that is for another article. My point here is, without Johnny Depp, there would be no Lone Ranger… but perhaps that would’ve been the best all along. Again… ill-advised is the phrase that comes to mind.
But you know what? Depp’s casting does not an entire movie make/ruin. One must evaluate a film as a whole, and the whole here is a pretty rip-roaring adventure told by the current reigning purveyors of “blockbuster weird”, Gore Verbinski and Depp.
I think The Lone Ranger is a better film than any of the wildly successful Pirates sequels. In part this is because I absolutely love the Western as a genre, with all its trappings. But Westerns aren’t “in” right now, so I’m not quite sure what everyone at Disney was expecting with this project. Maybe the idea was that Depp and Verbinski were so powerful a draw that they could reignite the Western with this new mega-franchise-to-be. Either way, the public didn’t embrace this film… at all. And honestly, they missed out.
Westerns offer a number of things that feel fresh and new here in 2013, despite the fact that they are as time-honored as apple pie. For one thing, The Lone Ranger is a stunningly beautiful film. Shot on location for the vast majority of its run time, Verbinski and Co. took us to Monument Valley and immersed us in a patently American landscape throughout the film. Frequent Verbinski collaborator Bojan Bazelli just shoots the hell out of this movie. Everything feels sharp, mythical, and Earthy, all at the same time. Sure it seems like the whole movie is set during magic hour, but this is another element of the Western that Lone Ranger touches on.
Westerns are a part of our American mythology. Texas Rangers, outlaws, “savages”, railroads. With its iconography, its cinematography, its score, and the story it weaves, The Lone Ranger offers us a rousing mythological tale while simultaneously working in a deconstruction of our mythology (which has been en vogue with Westerns since the 1970s). Here is a movie where we can celebrate the beauty of our country one minute, and wrestle with the dubious methods which forged our nation the next. And all while Johnny Depp relentlessly feeds a dead bird mounted on his head.
The Lone Ranger also offered us a massive blockbuster in the Summer of 2013 that wasn’t filled with enormous CGI devastation. Look, I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness and Man Of Steel, and loved Pacific Rim. But one can’t deny that a general sense of boredom has set in amonst at least the critical community when it comes to enormous, computer-rendered, urban destruction. As much as I believe the enormous budget of The Lone Ranger was a mistake… I see the whole thing up on the screen. Sweeping vistas, enormous train sequences. Real actors and real horses. While this film felt bloated at times, it also felt refreshingly tangible. And the action was clever, steady, and immaculately presented to the audience.
I won’t argue that the film doesn’t suffer from some bloat. That “only in the movies” scenario where heroes and villains alike stop what they are doing to offer a speech or lay out their nefarious plans… rather than simply acting… happens so frequently in The Lone Ranger that I can only read it as an attempt to be meta. But it didn’t work. From Depp’s Tonto to Tom Wilkinson’s villainous railroad magnate, way too many speeches were given.
And the framing device of the whole story, involving an elderly Tonto recounting the tale of The Lone Ranger’s origin as a lone force for good in a world out of balance, is an unnecessary failure. I guess the creative team felt the need to frame the story this way to emphasize that Tonto was, complicatedly, the “main” character of the movie. But this storytelling portion, often interrupting the main narrative Princess-Bride-style, actively took away from my enjoyment of the film. Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger could have attained the mythic status I needed him to simply through the “A” story the film was trying to tell. No framing device was needed and it added to the sense of bloat.
Then you’ve got the wild tonal shifts, the bizarre sense of humor that often felt more quirky than laugh-out-loud, and a left-field “steam punk” style extraneous character played by Helena Bonham Carter (who is becoming a caricature). Yet none of those issues overpowered me enough to call this a bad movie.
Aside from the brilliant Hans Zimmer score and the aforementioned devastating beauty of the overall film, there were also enough incredible moments of action, and appropriately relevant story to allow me to have a great time with this movie. There’s also an incredible supporting cast including a conflicted infantry-man played by Barry Pepper, Luther‘s Ruth Wilson as an unconventional leading lady, and an unrecognizable William Fichtner as a villainous and potentially cannibalistic cowboy.
We’re bombarded with super heroes right now, and I’m alright with that. But another strength of The Lone Ranger is a thematic one that insists that masks (anonymity, or at the very least a refusal to align with power) are a necessity in this complicated world. That heroes must fight outside of the system if they are to maintain their souls, because the system is already broken. It is a cynical, but interesting, message. And even Tonto’s character arc of jester, to avenger, to sage (“You are just another white man.”) is fairly compelling, even if the comedy, costume, and tonality of the performance and written character are a little off.
When it comes down to it, The Lone Ranger was a critical and box office failure. But I think this movie offers too much in the way of blockbuster entertainment value and compelling narrative to be as forgotten by history as many of its more successful contemporaries will be. I know I’ll be thinking about The Lone Ranger long after any single moment of The Wolverine fades from my memory. And while I’ve been told that the Pirates sequels might deserve another look from me someday, I’d much sooner re-watch The Lone Ranger than any of those sequels.
The Lone Ranger is a noble failure. A crap shoot that crapped out. Studios have to bet big these days, and Disney won’t have a problem bouncing back from this bad bet. But the great thing about it all is that, in the end, the film exists. You can buy it on blu-ray, or just rent it sometime, and none of the box office garbage or studio drama need apply to you, the viewer. If you can give The Lone Ranger a shot, brushing aside the drama (even if you can’t avoid knowing some of it), I think you’ll find plenty of value.
The Package
I can’t help but notice that damage control seems to have set in by the time this (stunning) blu-ray was being assembled. “Big names” Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski are virtually absent from the bonus materials of this film. Instead, Armie Hammer (who does an admirable job not being overshadowed by Depp in a pretty weird “lead” role) seems to be the face of the film when it comes to these bonus features. I think Hammer is great and hope the best for him after the financial disaster of this film. But it does seem odd that Depp and Verbinski are so absent here, almost retroactively throwing Hammer to the wolves as the “host” of this blu-ray.
That said, the bonus features further reinforced to me that the team involved in this film really set out to make something special, unique, grand, and classical. The bonus features highlight the building of the actual trains used in the climactic final act, the training the actors required to become citizens of an authentic American west, and so on.
Bonus features can go one of two ways on a film that “failed”. Sometimes you see producers and directors, stars and financiers… singing the praises of this enormous cinematic whiff they all created, and you wince; feeling almost a sense of embarrassment for them. But, in the case of The Lone Ranger, a film that largely worked for me, I found the bonus features to be endearing and even enhanced my already existing respect for the film. Sure, it bombed, no way around it. But not for lack of trying.
The bonus features are as follows, along with a DVD and digital copy of the film:
- Armie’s Western Road Trip
- Becoming A Cowboy
- Riding The Rails Of The Lone Ranger
- Deleted Scenes
- Bloopers
And I’m Out