Review: The Lone Ranger (video) - Montreal Gazette

The Lone Ranger

Rating: 2 out of 5

Starring: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer

Directed by: Gore Verbinski

Running time: 149 minutes

Parental guidance: Violence, some suggestive material

Playing at: Angrignon, Banque Scotia, Brossard, Cavendish, Colossus, C?te des Neiges, Deux Montagnes, Kirkland, Lacordaire, LaSalle, March? Central, Sources, Taschereau

Hi yo Silver, away! Far away! And keep going! The Lone Ranger is a $250-million mess, saved from catastrophe only by the opportunity to see another eccentric performance by Johnny Depp. In a casting coup of breathtaking political incorrectness, he plays Tonto, wearing whiteface and a fake nose and using one of those Native American accents that drop all the pronouns and articles ("Never take off mask.") His outfit includes a dead bird perched on his head.

The Lone Ranger himself is portrayed by Armie Hammer - the Winklevoss twins ride again - as a stolid, upright lawyer who has come to the Old West, like Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to bring justice to a troubled land.

Hammer's earnest, clean-cut performance makes you think of Brendan Fraser, but without the twinkle: When he puts on his leather mask, it looks like chartered public accountant night at the local S&M club.

The film, directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) is an origin story. John Reid (Hammer) comes to Texas to be the district attorney, but he immediately has to join a posse organized by his brother Dan (James Badge Dale), a Texas Ranger. They're after Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), a sadistic villain with a sneer permanently carved into his lips. When he eyes Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), Dan's comely wife, you fear for her virtue and the film's PG-13 rating.

Things go wrong, and all the rangers are killed except for John. Joining forces with Tonto - they meet cute, during Butch's escape from a train - John becomes the Lone Ranger, picking up a white horse named Silver, a white hat and the whitest smile in all of 19th-century Texas.

He must avenge his brother's death, despite the fact that he doesn't believe in guns, a refreshing change in the canon of $250-million messes, but small consolation.

This doesn't begin to describe the complexities of The Lone Ranger, a much-delayed production that seems to have addressed its narrative problems by adding more of them. Based on a fairly straightforward 1950s TV show (before that, it was a radio program), the movie version sprawls across the years and the miles, leaving in its wake extravagant sets and the special-effects explosions that destroy them. Most of the travel is by train - a railway baron, played by a lacklustre Tom Wilkinson, is the main bad guy - but you are never quite sure where you are or how you got there. The screenplay, credited to three writers, chugs from here to there with a relentless, big-budget hunger for movement and novelty.

It hauls us across deserts, through Utah's Monument Valley where John Ford set his iconic westerns, into saloons, and over the tops of moving locomotives as Verbinski scans the horizon for something - anything - to engage us.

It all has something to do with the way the white man stole silver from the Indians and then broke his treaties - the portrayal of natives is respectful, allowing for the fact that Capt. Jack Sparrow is part of the tribe - but it finds room for Helena Bonham Carter as a bordello madam with an ivory leg that shoots bullets, and a bizarre running gag about vicious, predatory rabbits that looks as if it was stolen from Monty Python.

This takes an unforgivable 2? hours, with only a few moments of relief. Most of these come from Depp, whose deadpan dismissal of the man he calls kemo sabe (he says it means "the wrong brother") adds an amusing note of irony.

It's all about the sly wink - last refuge of the failed film - and it further distances us by telling it in flashback, a tall tale narrated by an ancient Tonto who lives in a diorama in which he represents "The Noble Savage." If it were any more postmodern, it would be in French.

The Lone Ranger ends with an overburdened set piece - a train chase over and under bridges and on top of railway cars on a horse - that plays out to the famous theme song, The William Tell Overture. That's treated as a joke as well, but the galloping music is the most exciting thing in the movie. Put on mask, kemo sabe, and sneak out of town.

More movie? coverage at montrealgazette.com/movies

Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Move+review+Lone+Ranger/8608942/story.html

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