Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney perhaps hoped their Lone Ranger reboot, replete with hamming Captain Jack Tonto at its heart, would be a draw in the league of director Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean series. They were gravely mistaken. The kids don’t like cowboys, something Hollywood should have gauged after the resounding flop that was Cowboys & Aliens. Grown-ups however, do still enjoy the Wild West, it seems, as the age bracket drawn to the cinema by The Lone Ranger was often higher than expected. Maybe these were parents and grandparents seeking innocent, old-fashioned adventure fare for their little ones, or perhaps it's just because the film is a good-natured lark.
The plot, related whimsically by an ancient Tonto to a small boy at a Thirties San Fran carnie show, concerns wicked railroad types, silver-mining and justice for the death of the title character’s brother, all set in an 1869 Texas frontier town. It’s hokum but usually involving enough to hold the attention, backed up by some preposterous set-pieces, such as the final train chase. There are crafty nods to the classics, notably The Wild Bunch (a chorus of Robert Lowry’s gospel hymn “Shall We Gather at the River”), Once Upon a Time In the West (dust-coated baddies waiting at a station) and numerous John Ford references; and it stays faithful to the Fifties TV series in throwing in the "William Tell Overture" to bolster action in a high camp fashion.
The problems, aside from the film’s unnecessary length, lie in Armie Hammer’s painfully slow genesis from squarehead lawyer John Reid to the masked avenger. He’s not very interesting throughout, especially when scenery-chewed off the screen at every turn by a typically whacky Johhny Depp as Tonto. Helena Bonham-Carter also pops up for an amusing cameo as a bordello madam whose artificial leg houses weaponry. The whole thing adds up to an amusing bank holiday afternoon family film and is certainly under-served by its box office turkey repute.
DVD extras are a four minute blooper real, a deleted scene, a ten minute mini-doc about creating the film’s railways, a 15 minute mini-doc on Armie Hammer travelling the southern states to research his role, and an eight minute mini-doc observing the cast learning cowboy ways.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Lone Ranger
