2013’s The Lone Ranger revisited

There is some truth to the old adage “Don’t believe everything you read” and that first impressions are not always accurate. I got to thinking about this while I was watching the 2013 film The Lone Ranger. There was an old Native-American legend mentioned in the film that I wanted to use in making a statement about our current society, but I became so caught-up in offering an opinion first about this much-maligned film that I had to detach this part from what I had intended to talk about. 

Alright, so a week ago I was channel surfing when I noticed that The Lone Ranger had just started. I recall being off-put by the image of Johnny Depp as a Native-American with a dead bird on his head (“tonto” translates as “fool” in Spanish), and I assumed that this wasn’t a serious retelling based on the iconic television series that I recalled from my youth, maybe even worse than 1999’s The Wild, Wild West with Will Smith. Apparently most professional (i.e. paid) reviewers made the same assumption before they even saw the film, and it was almost universally panned, although the train finale was generally reluctantly praised. 

I decided to watch the film to see how bad it really was, and on this initial viewing I confess I kept asking myself “what the hell is this?” The elements for the kind of dark “origin” story that we have become accustomed to seeing were there, but that expectation was undercut by the John Reid character more bumbling into rather than evolving into the masked crusader. There were also so many bad guys it was hard to keep track of just who we were to focus on as the principle villain. And then there was Depp’s injecting his usual “weirdness” into his otherwise wise Tonto, and perhaps not surprisingly he steals much of the attention from the Ranger.

Still, I found myself intrigued by Reid’s transformation, and the seemingly detached story lines—which involved corporate America, “manifest destiny,” the military-industrial complex, psychopathic criminals being accomplices to supposedly “law-abiding” robber-barons, and of course the theft of Native-American land—all which ultimately made “sense” in the end, and the climactic scene in which all the bad guys met their just ends at the hands of two seeming misfits, out-of-place in this new world order, was indeed thrilling and suitably propelled along by the William Tell Overture (which I’ve read younger viewers had no clue that for people my age this and the Lone Ranger were inseparably intertwined). If the action during the climax seemed a bit “improbable,” then we would have to consider compared to what? At least it seemed “real”—certainly more real and human than your typical “super-hero” and “gender-correct” action fare.  

The ending left me with such a positive feeling that I wondered if this film had been given a fair shake by film critics, which Depp and Armie Hammer (as the Ranger) accused them of not giving it because of well-publicized production problems. I purchased the film on DVD and watched it again a week later just to make sure my second thoughts about it held water. Critics had attacked the film for its contradictory “tone,” its length, and for supposedly being made for “adolescent boys.” Even if these things were true, I didn’t see them as “problems” preventing enjoyment of the film. I got to wondering if it wasn’t complete morons who were responsible for these negative reviews, then it was just critics who suddenly lost their ability to judge a film on its own merits, not from some expectation of a mythical “days of yesteryear.” Even the “revisionists” tempered their praise by saying the movie wasn’t “perfect,” but what movie is? How many Academy Awards did Titanic win? When I saw it in a theater I was sound asleep forty minutes into it; it must have been some internal alarm clock that awoke me an hour later, just in time for when the film actually became interesting. 

I thought that Depp and Hammer made for a fine comic duo (particularly at those times when straight-arrow Reid interfered with Tonto’s quest for vengeance against the “wendigos” who as a child he inadvertently aided in the massacre of his tribe, after “trading” the location of a rich silver lode for a cheap pocket watch), and their misadventures in bringing the evil, hair-lipped Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to justice for their own personal reasons--only to discover that he is just a supporting player in the main villainy--is what "pop-corn" movies are made of. The only time I thought the movie “dragged” was during scenes when the main villain, Cole (played by Tom Wilkinson) tried to insinuate himself into the life of the widow of Reid’s deceased lawman brother, in the hopes of adopting her son as his heir to a rail “empire” paid for by that ill-gotten silver fortune.

The train finale could have been a confusing mess with two trains on separate tracks, but instead takes its time to unfold with the Ranger and Tonto obliged to overcome many obstacles before the final confrontation, and in so doing makes for one of the more exciting and satisfying action sequences you will ever see; it also manages to tie the plot threads together, including making clear that from the beginning that not only were Cavendish and Cole the brothers that the boy Tonto had encountered, but Cavendish was his brother’s handyman in dirty work, employing both his gang and the U.S. Cavalry to drive the Indians off their land to make room for Cole’s railroad. 

Ultimately I found the film not just a lot of fun from start to finish, but even a historically educational way to spend 150 minutes of leisure time, worthy of repeat viewing—and it deserves a sequel with the two principles returning, if Disney demonstrates the same “courage” it took to make this film in the first place.