TITLE: The Lone Ranger

STARRING: Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer

GENRE: Western, action, and comedy

DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski

PRODUCTION STUDIO: Walt Disney Pictures

RATING: PG-13

RELEASED: July 3, 2013

I have to admit, before this movie came out, I had little interest in going to see it. The one saving grace that made me consider seeing it was Johnny Depp playing Tonto, but even that didn’t quite get me interested enough. Perhaps it has something to do with never being someone who got into the whole Lone Ranger thing, considering I’ve only seen a few reruns of the black-and-white TV show as a kid. But the movie just seemed kind of overblown and out there from the ads I saw. Yet, cue in a rainy Fourth of July week that kept me from being able to go to the pool or the beach, and a reason cropped up for me to head to the theaters. With The Lone Ranger being the only big movie that appealed to me at the theater that day, I decided to give it a shot.

One thing that deserves applause is that the story is told in a rather unique way. The film begins in 1933 at a carnival in San Francisco, where a young boy stops in at a Wild West side-show attraction. While there, the young boy meets an elderly Comanche who makes the claim that he is the famous Tonto from The Lone Ranger stories. He tells the kid, who had removed his black Lone Ranger’s mask, to “never take the mask off,” and when the kid asks him what difference taking off the mask would make, he proceeds to tell his skeptical audience the origin tale of the man who later came to be called The Lone Ranger. The rest of the film takes place mostly in the past, but sometimes the story comes to a pause when the kid asks questions and pokes holes in things left rather unspecific by the Native American with the dead bird on his head.

The rest of the relevant story takes place in Texas, Utah, and other in-between locales in 1869, right at the peak of the railroad movement to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by rail. The story is centered on a ruthless outlaw named Butch Cavendish, who is being transported by train to Texas to be hanged for his crimes. John Reid, a lawyer, happens to be on the train when Cavendish’s men come to help him break free. During this time, he meets up with Tonto, another prisoner on the train (for reasons that are sadly never explained in the film), who saves his life after their train car careens off the tracks and nearly kills them. Reid gets deputized as a Texas Ranger by his brother Dan in order to join a posse that sets out to hunt down Cavendish and his men. When they are betrayed and brutally murdered, John, who miraculously survives (and becomes the butt of some running jokes from Tonto for the remainder of the film), begins to hide his identity and lets stories about him being the “ghost of Dan Reid” run wild as he searches for justice.

With the basic premise off to a good start, the movie slowly becomes bogged down with unnecessary side-stories and bloated plot devices. What starts out as a story about a lawyer who seeks justice for his brother’s murder outside of the bounds of the law quickly starts to thread out into too many different areas. After a while, you simply aren’t sure if this is a story about frontier justice, a cautionary tale about greedy industrial tycoons, a tale about lost treasures, or an eye-opening documentary about the injustices wrought upon the Native Americans by the white man.

Minor Spoiler Alert: By the end of the movie, Cavendish seems to be little more than the strong-arm of the railroad corporation – a company led by a man who is seeking a lost silver reserve in the hills that he wants to use for a hostile takeover of the corporation. Even the infantry is duped into their pockets by the hapless Captain Jay Fuller – a man who seems like a gullible image of Custer, just a few years before Little Big Horn.

At the end of the day, everything does wrap up well enough to where things make sense, but ultimately what saves the day is the quality acting by Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. Many people questioned Depp’s portrayal of Tonto, wondering if he would ultimately do justice to the Comanche people, yet Depp does a good job paying homage to their culture and even speaking their language. Depp, of course, brings his typical fun-loving nature to the table and provides comic relief throughout the story, though his character’s past is flawed and tragic enough to the point where the audience really does feel that there is a lot more to him than he lets on.

From a historical perspective, the movie does a fine enough job of portraying rural life in 1869, truly mirroring the style of the classic Spaghetti Westerns of yore. There are a couple minor anachronisms here and there, such as a playful mention by Tonto of a “refrigerator” (a device that was hardly known at all, as it was very experimental in 1869), though most of the time these are meant to be joking and not taken incredibly seriously.

All-in-all, the film stumbles in a few areas, but manages to tell a fun story. If you like Westerns, a fun action story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and Johnny Depp’s style of comedy, this movie is certainly worth seeing. However, if you are looking for a very accurate portrayal of the Old West and a down-to-earth tale of gunslinging, this one may not fit the bill. Still, most moviegoers are likely to find this to be a fun use of their two-and-a-half hours, even if the film could have been a little shorter.

FINAL GRADE: B-

Overall, Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer manage to get things back on course for a film whose writers simply didn’t seem to know which way they were headed.