The Lone Ranger

After the colossal, traumatizing failure of John Carter, worse was yet to come for Disney. The late 2000s and early 2010s were a difficult period for Walt Disney Studios. While Disney had acquired Marvel in 2009, the MCU had yet to get up and running, with only 2008’s Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk having been released. The purchase of Lucasfilm wasn’t completed until 2012. Pixar was still delivering big hits for Disney but Walt Disney Pictures…things were not going according to plan. It wasn’t as though there weren’t hits, but the big projects, the ones with the huge budgets, they failed. Over and over again.

Do you remember 2009’s guinea pig-based adventure movie G-Force? Maybe just broke even on its $150 million budget. 2010’s Prince of Persia adaptation? $200 million, made a loss, killed any hopes of a franchise. 2010’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? A $150 million bomb which I haven’t heard anything about. Tron Legacy did okay and is getting a sequel this year. Mars Needs Moms cost Disney $150 million to make and took under $40 million globally. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides did crazy money, but it did cost $400 million. And then John Carter, with its $300 million budget, died on its arse and you could hardly blame Disney for being nervous about The Lone Ranger, their big budget ($250 million) 2013 summer tentpole.

Executives in Hollywood had been playing Pass the Parcel with The Lone Ranger IP for years and years. The 1930s radio serial and 1950s TV series were cultural touchstones for many Americans and creatives have exploited nostalgia with great success since always, and after the 1981 Lone Ranger flop, it was probably considered time for the franchise to ride again. I’m not sure why. The golden age of the Western was long gone. Clint Eastwood’s masterful Unforgiven, gritty and grimy and uncompromising, helped put a final bullet in the head of the old-school rose-tinted manifest destiny flavour of Western and while 2012’s Django Unchained runs round in revisionist Western clothing, it never wanders very far West and, like many of Tarantino’s movies of that period, revels in being a pastiche of a genre’s tropes rather than a whole-hearted exploration of them.

But the IP was available and so was Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski, too, and Jerry Bruckheimer to do the hard yards as producer. They’d done wonders together on POTC, scripted by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who also returned, so I certainly understand why Disney wouldn’t want the same creative team back in the saddle. Producer, director, writers, and A-list megastar.

The writers wrote. Armie Hammer got the nod as the titular hero after good work in The Social Network. His star was on the rise. Add in some ever-reliable character actors in support – William Fichtner, Tom Wilkinson, Barry Pepper, James Badge Dale, Helena Bonham Carter – and you’re all set. Right? Right?

The Lone Ranger opens with a framing device. In 1933, a boy dressed as The Lone Ranger (getting dangerously meta here) attends an exhibition on the Old West and comes across Johnny Depp’s Tonto, slumming it as a human exhibit. Tonto begins telling the kid the true story of The Lone Ranger.

In 1869, Texas Ranger Dan Reid (Badge Dale) awaits the arrival of a train on the unfinished Transcontinental Railroad. Aboard the train is his brother, John (Hammer), the captured outlaw Butch Cavendish (Fichtner) on his way for hanging, and, for reasons never disclosed, Tonto, who is chained to Cavendish. Cavendish almost manages to escape. John Reid, a punctilious prissy stickler for non-violence and justice, prevents Tonto from killing Cavendish and fails to prevent the outlaw from finally escaping and, after narrowly surviving a train crash, gets deputised by Ranger Dan to hunt Cavendish down. Tonto gets locked up in jail, but not for long as he almost immediately escapes. There’s also a brief moment with John and Dan’s wife, Rebecca, who conveniently is John’s old girlfriend.

Cavendish and his men ambush and kill all of the Rangers. John and Dan survive long enough for John to witness Cavendish cut out and eat Dan’s heart (uh ok). Tonto happens upon the slaughter later and buries the dead, but not John, who is ‘resurrected’ by a mysterious white horse who joins them. Yes, Silver, the famous third member of the crew. Tonto and John, now wearing a mask, work together to hunt down Cavendish and his gang and get revenge.

A bunch of pointless crap happens. The pair visit a brothel to hunt down a lead and receive a donation of plot. Cavendish’s gang begin raiding frontier villages while dressed as Comanches. They kidnap Rebecca and her son. They are effectively rescued by railroad head honcho Latham Cole (Wilkinson) who tells the Army, led by Captain Fuller (Pepper) the raids are being carried out by Comanches and the Army is all too pleased to get to the ol’ ethnic cleansing (say what) and Cole can build the railroad across Comanche territory.

Meanwhile, lost in the desert, John and Tonto are captured by the Comanche. John gets another steaming hot plate of backstory served to him, this time about Tonto, who holds himself responsible for the massacre of his tribe by a pair of men he saved from death as a child. These men discovered a huge silver deposit and murdered Tonto’s tribe to keep its location secret (ok wow), and the trauma of it has made Tonto somewhat broken and unpredictable. Then the Army attack and the Comanche flee, leaving Tonto and John to escape. They go to the silver mine and capture Cavendish. John, again, refuses to let Tonto kill Cavendish in the name of justice and hands Cavendish to Cole and Fuller for custody.

Then the jig is up. Those two evil men who killed Tonto’s tribe? Cavendish and Cole, actually brothers, out to have the Comanches slaughtered so as to complete the railroad, sell all the silver and make a ton of cash. Cole convinces Fuller that he’ll be known as a war criminal if John reveals the truth to the world, so Fuller joins them on the officially evil side. Fuller plans to execute John at the mine, but Tonto engineers John’s escape, but not before the Comanches attack and get killed to the last man in a futile last ditch headlong charge into gunfire (wtf?).

John decides that his only course of action is vigilantism and he and Tonto hatch a cunning plan to take Cole and Cavendish down. They start by blowing up a bridge and then there’s an amazing 25-minute action sequence I have no wish to spoil, but the day ends with the bad guys dead and frontier justice served.

As so often happens with big-budget Hollywood nonsense, The Lone Ranger is half of a very good film with half of a really shit one stitched into it. The opening 45 minutes of this film are great. The performances are solid, the writing is serviceable, and the opening action sequence is very, very good. The last 25 minutes are fantastic. It’s a literal train chase and is incredibly well-conceived and executed and gloriously inventive and funny and a prime example of the very best Elliot, Rossio and Verbinski can deliver. The issue is that The Lone Ranger isn’t 70 minutes long. It’s 150. There’s a whole act two for the audience to suffer through.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s Tarantino, from an interview with Les Inrockuptibles: “The first forty-five minutes are excellent…the next forty-five minutes are a little soporific. It was a bad idea to split the bad guys in two groups; it takes hours to explain and nobody cares. Then comes the train scene—incredible! When I saw it, I kept thinking, 'What, that's the film that everybody says is crap? Seriously?’” I couldn’t agree more.

Outside of the first and third acts, there is an awful lot wrong with this film, and not just on a story-telling level. Strap in and get comfy. This is going to take a while.

Let’s start with tone. This is a Disney movie and therefore is squarely aimed at families. Just like John Carter, it is also squarely aimed at boys. Disney was desperate to get boys into the cinema in the early 2010s, which is precisely why they greenlit the Prince of Persia and John Carter adaptations. So, The Lone Ranger is a family-friendly movie, right? Well, it starts out innocently enough. There’s a charming goofiness to the early stages. Cavendish is suitable gross and creepy as a villain. And then, it starts to get all Wild Bunch on the viewer when Cavendish cuts out Dan Reid’s heart and eats it because Verbinski wheeled out his inner Peckinpah to dispense some ultraviolence. This tonal switchbacking continues throughout the movie. For every cute and funny moment with Silver, there’s some horrible dark sequence of Tonto’s PTSD or the Army massacring the Comanche. Is this an adventure movie for kids, or is it a revisionist Western? While I applaud the script’s commitment to honestly representing the mistreatment and murder of Native Americans by the American state and white settlers, this kid’s summer blockbuster is not exactly the right place to do it. It’s a bold decision, but this theme demands a full and serious treatment, and not wasted as a throwaway in a film like this one.

The issues with tone lead immediately into issues with theme. The Lone Ranger explores two key themes. The minor theme is of how industrial civilisation values profit at any cost over the environment and indigenous peoples. Our villains, Cole and Cavendish, are out for money and power and nothing else. They are paper-thin caricatures of the excesses of industrialization. There’s no attempt here to hide their greed behind the fig leaf of progress. They want the silver and the railroad cash and will exterminate the Comanche to get it. This renders them pure evil and not the fun kind of evil either.

The major theme of this film is not handled well. John Reid and Tonto stand at the opposite ends of the justice-revenge axis. Reid is cowardly, a man of law books and not action, and is either treated as a goofball by the script or is actively goofy. His consistent motive through the film is not to get revenge on the man who killed his brother, but to bring him back to town for justice. On several occasions, Reid prevents Tonto from killing Cavendish when most people would consider Tonto justified in doing so. Tonto, as noted, is on a twenty-year-long quest for revenge. If John Reid is truly the hero of this piece, then the film should surely stick to its guns and have him deliver the bad guys to the courts. But, right at the start of the third act, The Lone Ranger sides completely with Tonto and goes vigilante and robs a bank and blows up a bridge and hijacks a train and this leads to the deaths of Cole, Cavendish and Fuller in satisfying ways…making the theme of the story “Yes, little Timmy, violent revenge is cool and good! Even if you’re against it on moral and judicial grounds!”

I think part of this tonal and thematic mess is due to the fact that the Lone Ranger is not the protagonist of his own film. He’s weak and ineffectual and afraid to use guns and much too in love with the law to carry the weight of the story. He isn’t hero enough. Not even when he embraces the vigilante life. He wants justice, but what does he need? What is his secret wound? The protagonist here is Tonto. Tonto is the character whose needs and wants drive the film forward. It’s Tonto who had the chance to kill Cavendish in the first act, after getting himself transported alongside Cavendish. Tonto saves John Reid, several times. Tonto does all the difficult stuff, all the fancy tricks. It's Tonto telling the damn story in the framing device. Everything that happens, happens because of Tonto. Johnny Depp was the big A-lister cast as Tonto. Perhaps if the producers had really wanted to shake things up, they could have called this film Tonto. That would have gotten people’s attention.

Although this would not have solved the issue of casting Depp as Tonto in the first place. Historically, all the previous portrayals of Tonto on screen were by actors with Native American heritage. Depp claims to have this too, but cannot prove it. The producers cast a white man as Tonto and the writers and director enabled Depp to play him in a problematic way. In retaining the TV show Tonto’s halting manner of speech, even though it is hand-waved away as a relic of trauma, this film perpetuates the stereotype of Native Americans as uneducated savages, even as it tries to confront it. The costume design for Tonto doesn’t help and Depp spends most of the movie with a completely painted face. The single biggest role for a Native American actor in ages went to a man in, ahem, redface.

Then again, let’s consider who exactly this film was aimed at. The prime years of The Lone Ranger’s appeal were long gone, and had been steadily waning since the Sixties. So the IP was available. So what? Disney made exactly the same mistake with John Carter. The Barsoom novels were no longer a big deal. Nor The Lone Ranger. But Disney burned the best part of a billion dollars making and promoting their adaptations. Some have argued that audiences were getting tired of Johnny Depp. That’s probably a factor. Westerns have been successful in recent years at the box office, but the market for Westerns is limited and has been so since the Eighties. When a movie needs to take $800 million to break even, you know you’re in for a tough time, even more so when said movie is a Western.

It doesn’t make sense. A great many talented people worked hard for years to make this movie. The performances are solid. Armie Hammer does OK with a weak hero. Depp turns Tonto into a depressed, less manic Comanche Jack Sparrow. The cast all battle manfully against a weak script. The film looks great. The action sequences are wonderful. When you hear the unmistakeable sound of the William Tell Overture, good things happen. It’s just a shame about the middle 70 minutes. This film could have been great and instead is one of the biggest bombs of all time.