THE LONE RANGER

The Pirates of the Caribbean famously started out as a Disney theme park attraction and went on to gross significant amounts of money for the producers (and four sequels).  It should come as little surprise then that director Gore Vorbinski would want to try the same and recapture the spark that made the original movie so enjoyable.    His source this time is not a theme park attraction but a hero who first originated on radio before making the leap to television.  This, it might be thought is firmer footing for a summer blockbuster than an amusement park attraction populated by crumbling animatronic dummies ....you would think that anyway.

If you’re wondering why I started by mentioning the Piratesmovies it’s because this movie is trying its hardest to be them. It’s not just a case of being from the same adventure comedy genre but the entire feel of the film is like Vorbisnski shouting "hey remember that movie with pirates? You liked that?  Right, well cowboys are kinda like pirates ..right?  Let’s do this."The problem is that the  Lone Ranger on its best day just can't fill its more famous (and I'm sure more financially lucrative ) predecessor’s pirates boots.

This is not to say, of course,that there are not enjoyable things in the film. The script is at its best when it’s conveying humorous dialogue - much of the married couple-like bickering between the Ranger and Tonto is highly enjoyable.        A lot of the action scenes are quite good at keeping up the adventurous tone of the movie but the problem lies with the attempts to be serious - which sadly is about 60% of the time.  Worse, still, in an bizarre and misguided attempt to be gritty,dark and gruesome, events and descriptions are brought into the film which feel  out-of-place for a family adventure film.   A villain who cuts out and eats victims’ hearts (never on screen but we hear it at one point) and natives being gunned down by machine guns just don't really seem to fit into what the  picture is trying to be.  Why the writers felt these things were needed are a bit difficult to fathom as their absence would not take anything away from the film  - the villains would be no less evil by their other actions.

This ‘tone’ problem leaves the film feeling very uneven and uncomfortable at times.  A far more overriding problem is our main protagonist, Arnie Hammer, does his best but there’s no getting around the fact that our main hero is rather boring as a character having only cliched motivations and talking mainly in stock heroic dialogue.

Johnny Depp’s Tonto is a far more interesting character yet is insufficiently involved to carry the film on his own.  Some have criticised casting Depp as the heroic native American although he does claim some Comanche ancestry.  It is interesting that they chose to have Tonto wear white facepaint for the duration of the film,one can't help but wonder if that is to spare another kind of make-up job.  Again his dialogue contributes towards the cringe factor. 

FINAL VERDICT 4/10 Still entertaining and not without its charms but it hadthe potential to be so much more,a lack of effort on the part of the makers leaves it dead in the dust.