1 ½ pipes out of 4
Drink up me harties yo ho! Oh wait, that’s a
different movie right? At times it is incredibly hard to tell and the only
distinguishing aspect is the setting in the dessert instead of the seven seas.
Johnny Depp is at the forefront as Tonto, shoving the Lone Ranger (Armie
Hammer) to a supporting character which gives the film a fresh take on the
masked vigilante except that instead of a Tonto of old, we view a pirate in the
middle of a dessert. Depp maneuvers around the film as an exiled Native
American of a dying tribe bent on evoking justice on the two men who
slaughtered his village. His only companions are a dead crow sitting on his
head and a morally conflicted Lone Ranger seeking justice for his brother’s murderer.
The moral conflict raging inside the Lone Ranger, on whether it is justice if
he kills his brother’s killer or the government does would be fine and actually
interesting had the film ended at the hour and a half point. The fact that the
film continues for a whole other hour with the same scenarios arriving with the
same results is ridiculous. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over expecting different results and by this definition the lone
ranger is a lunatic. The audience gets bored seeing the same thing happen over
and over with no issues resolved and becomes so far gone that they can’t
comeback far enough to care about the films climax. The saving grace of the
film from being a complete and total failure is Johnny Depp’s uncanny ability
to make the audience laugh even though we have seen the same character before.
What was initially thought of as simply another white man trying to play Indian
turns into a well done portrayal of Tonto by Depp. He is believable to the
character and keeps the depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood moving in
the right direction as almost truthful.
