Let me start by saying that I have always considered myself a fan of The Lone Rangers. I wore out my cassette of Live and in Prison and their song “Degenerated” really spoke to me as a youth. Knowing this, I was psyched when I heard they were making a movie about the band’s exploits post-Airheads. You can imagine my discouragement when I came to find Armie Hammer playing a masked vigilante seeking justice in the Old West, and that feeling rose to terror when I learned that it was a live-action Disney movie featuring Johnny Depp as a Native American. I cannot stand Johnny Depp. I loved Edward Scissorhands, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Donnie Brasco, but beyond that I find him to be supremely overrated and downright annoying. I have always thought of Johnny Depp as an average looking, eccentric guy who plays weird characters and then gets a ton of praise heaped upon him even though he was just being the strange person that he is. Needless to say, I was less than psyched heading into the theatre on a lovely July Fourth afternoon.

The Lone Ranger is set up in a narrative format. The movie begins with a young boy at a carnival in the 1930’s dressed up like the Lone Ranger. He stumbles across museum-like displays of early America, eventually coming across an older Indian man that manages to come to life so that he can tell the young boy his story. As the movie progresses, viewers learn what they should have known from the start – that old Indian is Tonto, sidekick of the Lone Ranger. Throughout the movie, progress on the story is occasionally stopped so that Tonto can attempt to give some comic relief to the audience through his confused interactions with this young boy, a tool that does little else than extend the movie, which unnecessarily tops out around two-and-a-half hours.

Once the beef of the story gets going, the acting carries the movie forward more than the story progression. Armie Hammer plays John Reid, a lawyer who is forced to turn into the Lone Ranger, and does an OK job selling the idea that he has no idea what is going on around him, though he never hits that Winklevoss stride that he had in The Social Network. Surprisingly, Johnny Depp was convincing at times as a Native American. Of course, he was playing a wacky Indian who was all over the place with the things he was saying, but when he was saying less he was believable. He did a lot of strong acting with his eyes and facial expressions, and I was impressed. I’m not going to run out and grab a copy of Alice in Wonderland or anything, but I thought he was a strong piece of the movie. The supporting acting was up and down. William Fichtner plays a nasty villain well. Tom Wilkinson plays the same character he plays in every movie of this kind (see Rush Hour). James Badge Dale, fresh off of a fine performance in World War Z, does a nice job playing the Lone Ranger’s brother, Dan Reid. Luther star Ruth Wilson brought her overbite across the pond to play the damsel in distress and was nothing special. Out of nowhere Barry Pepper showed up to play American military lead Captain Fuller, who looks like General Custer. Pepper was nice to see and could have used some more screen time. Last but not least, since this was a Johnny Depp film, Helena Bonham Carter played Red Harrington, the owner and operator of a gentlemen’s club. Carter is a wonderful actress and this job was not too big for her, but instead the character of Red Harrington was an issue, which brings about one of the main problems with the film.

I said it earlier, The Lone Ranger is about two-and-a-half hours long. There are plenty of things that should have been left on the cutting room floor, if not left out of the script entirely. Helena Bonham Carter’s character of Red Harrington is a prime example of this. She does very little to move the story along, but she has a whole scene dedicated to her and her club and is a major piece of the big lead up to the huge action sequence at the end. I may be wrong, but my impression is that the only reason this character was included was to get Carter into the movie and into the commercials; there is no other justifiable explanation. There is absolutely no reason why The Lone Ranger needed to be any longer than one-hundred minutes, with an out-and-out maximum of two hours. There is story progression throughout the whole movie, but there is a lot of time wasted with things that do not need to be there for the story to progress (meeting Red at her place of business, the breaks for narrative insertion, Tonto introspection, etc.). You do not get the feeling that your time is being wasted while you are watching it, but the movie does feel like two-and-a-half hours while you are watching it, which is never the feeling you want while enjoying something.

Another issue with the movie is a quick one. As I have made mention of in prior reviews, I despise CGI because it is unrealistic and unnecessary. I can understand the need for it in interstellar films about alien locales that do not really exist, or when trying to show a fully personified Scooby Doo wearing a dress or doing something else stupid. I do not like it, but I get it. One place where I do not need CGI is in the Old West. I seem to remember a time traveling train that did a pretty good job with things in Back to the Future Part III, so why over twenty years later am I getting cartoonish CGI trains to complete stunts? It just seems like people do not want to put forth the effort these days with stunts, and to make them look “more real” (see, that is a joke because they really look less real… that is why I used the quotes, for emphasis) studios are getting one nerd to make a stunt look real rather than a whole crew to make a real stunt. Imagine Jaws with a CGI shark and a boat that got puzzle pieces digitally removed from it when the shark attacked? You know what, don’t imagine that. It’s despicable.

Last but not least was the treatment of the Native Americans in the movie. The producers of The Lone Ranger decided to tap into a little something known as “white man’s guilt” when they made this movie. Whether this made them feel better about the lives they lead or if it is supposed to make us feel worse about our own lives, I am not sure. And that is what was confusing and unfortunate about The Lone Ranger. Throughout the movie I could not figure out who I was supposed to be behind; the Native Americans who were getting double crossed by rich white men but also sent Tonto packing when they booted him out of the tribe, or the bad white guys who wanted to make the transcontinental railroad which was vital to the nation we live in, or the good white guys who wanted to stop the progress altogether. It was very ambiguous and it pretty much vilified everyone. Even Tonto.

To put things into perspective, The Lone Ranger really was not that bad. It was not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was not bad. The beginning is really not good, but like the locomotive that the film ends up centering around, it picked up steam as it went. There simply was not enough steam to carry it all the way though, as it was such a long journey. If you are an old person (which I assume is just my father, because I have no clue how the hell other old people would find this… so hello Dad), you very well may enjoy this movie. All of the old people in the theatre – and there were a lot of them – had their share of laughs when Tonto mocked the hero. We’ll see you back when Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill team up for the remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in 2014. That is a real thing, that movie is happening. Where the hell is my movie adaptation of The Greatest American Hero?