Review: The Lone Ranger (2013)

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never really been a huge fan of the Bruckheimer/Verbinski movie team.  I enjoyed the first Pirates flick and even some bits of the sequels, but their style of filmmaking doesn’t really appeal to me.  Sure, there are some cool stunts here and there and even some interesting characters, but the overall focus on action over essence reeks too much of the “Michael Bay Syndrome” that is turning our summer blockbusters into clichés.  Still, I decided to give The Lone Ranger a try.  After all, it couldn’t be as bad as everyone has been saying it was, right?

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of The Long Ranger, it’s a pretty simple layout.  It’s set in the times of the Wild West.  There’s a man that’s almost killed by bandits.  He has a side-kick named Tonto, a Native American that rides with him as the pair head out to dispense justice on the lawless plains.  They fight bad guys and do the sort of stuff that Wild West cowboy heroes do.

Being that the character of the Lone Ranger has been out of circulation for some time, they opted to make this movie into an origin story.  The titular character begins as a naïve attorney and ends up, after losing his brother and being forced to fight to save people’s lives, as a gun-slinging cowboy.  Tonto, on the other hand, seeks revenge and, with the help of the Ranger, ends up getting it.

There’s really not much more to the movie than that.  There are some plot twists involving the bad guys and who they’re actually working for, but it’s little more than a cliché that’s been used time and again in westerns (and in many other genres).  The movie brings very little that is original to the table, relying instead on the way it’s put together to attract and entertain audiences.

While there are a few interesting stunts, the rest of the film rises to the mediocre level at best.  The two main characters spend more than half their time acting like idiots, so when the story gets serious you just can’t get into it.  The secondary characters are more interesting than the Ranger and Tonto, which is a bad sign for a movie.  As if to intentionally exacerbate this problem, the dialogue is so bad that I found myself wanting to close my ears so that the pain would stop.  Add to that a healthy dose of physics-defying action and you’ve got Pirates of the Caribbean, except without the interesting character of Jack Sparrow and without the one thing that made that series bearable - pirates.  The same old formula just does not work in the old west.

In the end, it felt like 3 or 4 different movies crammed into one.  It couldn’t decide whether it wanted to appeal to 10-year-olds or tell a serious tale of tragedy and revenge.  It ended up curbing both approaches to reach for some middle ground that didn’t exist.  It took me an extreme effort of will to not turn this one off on several occasions.

The folks at Rotten Tomatoes have given The Lone Ranger a paltry 31/56% and I’d tend to agree with the critics on this one.  For those that prefer their summer blockbusters to be simple and enjoy being able to turn their brains off while watching a movie, this is perfect.  For the rest of us, it’s just a poorly produced cliché-fest and by far one of the lowest points in many of the cast and crew’s careers.

Photo Credits -           

Lone Ranger courtesy of showbiz411.com