I’m not sure at what age I first learned of The Lone Ranger
but I think it was when the ads for this line of toys appeared in my youth. My
one solid memory of this is of the origin tale of the character as it was
related on the packaging for these pieces of sturdy plastic. It was laid out in
comic book fashion and got across the story briefly and effectively enough that
I wanted the toys and spent hours playing Lone Ranger and Tonto with them.
I lay this out because most fans of the character seem
to have come to it through the Clayton Moore television series of the 1950’s
but to this day I have only seen a handful of episodes of that much loved show.
I don’t dislike what I’ve seen of it but it held no particular appeal for me
so…….
I remember pretty well the hubbub that sprang up around the
production of the feature film
THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER (1981) and
remember thinking it had the reputation of being a silly mess surrounding a
character I had walked away from around the same time I lost or mangled beyond
repair my old toys. Time marches on and cooler things were out there mostly in
the form of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and Fantastic Four comic books. By 1981
I was occasionally able to get to a movie theater but I never even wanted to
catch this incarnation of the Lone Ranger and I even passed up any opportunity
once it showed up on pay cable a few years afterwards. What few moments I saw at
the time seemed very uninteresting especially when time could be better spent
watching THE GODFATHER or SUPERMAN again. In fact, the 1981 LR film made so
small a ripple in my movie loving mind that I was only reminded of it when the
new Disney produced giant budgeted Summer Blockbuster ® was barreling down the
chute to a theater near everyone. Now, I thought, now is the time to finally
see that long forgotten and badmouthed western.
“Surely,” I thought, “it couldn’t really be as bad as the
press made out back in the eighties. I bet it’s actually pretty good. I’m sure
the ham-handed way the film’s producers handled the release and the controversy
over letting Clayton Moore wear his Lone Ranger mask in public obscured a
quality slice of cinema ripe for reevaluation. I’ll dig the film up and check
it out before venturing out to see the new version. It’ll be instructive.”
And my friends, it was instructive. THE LEGEND OF THE LONE
RANGER is without a doubt one of the lousiest western movies I have ever seen.
I don’t say this lightly. I have seen a lot of B grade westerns from the 1940’s
and 50’s but I would recommend even the worst of those oaters over this boring,
poorly directed, badly photographed attempt to craft a movie. The film’s only
good as a curio of how to have a number of things in place and just not know
how to line them up. The script is pedestrian with no energy or verve. It goes
out of its way to set up the Ranger’s childhood for no good reason serving only
to eat up screen time that could have been better used to tell a story about
the freakin’ Lone Ranger doing something!
Much has been made of the casting of the lead and I have to
admit that Klinton Spilsbury is no one’s idea of a leading man- except the
producers of this film! He isn’t always bad but most of the time his performance
is flat and as an onscreen presence he is simply uninteresting. In a genre
dominated by actors that the camera loves Spilsbury can't hold his own because
the camera doesn't seem to know he's there. Sadly, I don’t even like actor Michael
Horse as Tonto either. It was nice to see a real Native American in the role
but he has many of the same acting deficiencies as his co-star making things
dull every time they are exchanging dialog. After a while I kept hoping the
film would descend into deeper depths of ‘bad’ so I could at least start having
some fun by laughing at it. But the movie manages to maintain a level of
mediocrity that made it hover in the tedious range causing my eyes to glaze
over at the paucity of talent being brought to bear on this tale. How could
such a well known character become so poorly represented on the big screen? Why
was this pretty damned good story being handled in such a lackluster manner? It
was just a sad thing to see. The 2013 film was going to be much better than
this. Easily!
Woo boy.
I sat down in the theater last month to see THE LONE RANGER
(2013) with mixed feelings. The reviews had been harsh but I had heard enough
good comments from film nuts to make me think this one might be another of the
'hated at the time but loved later on' movies that I find so endearing. Damn.
I will just start by saying that this film is easily an hour
too long. That's right- I didn't mistype that sentence. THE LONE RANGER could
have and should have been trimmed by at least an hour and the place to start is
the framing story of the old Tonto relating the main tale to a boy in the
1920's. Who thought this was a good idea? I suspect the scriptwriters thought
that by couching the story as a Tall Tale told by an Unreliable Narrator they
could slide some of their more asinine scenes and uncomfortable juxtapositions
by the audience. After all- how do you justify a film that shows the genocide
of a tribe of Indians right before it tries to convince you that a man on
horseback could ride at a gallop through a passenger train car. One is a
terrible, dark moment of real weight and the other is a silly, impossible scene
that gets dumber as it goes on. Hell- it started with the Ranger riding his
horse on top of the moving train in the first place and just gets more
ridiculous as it continues with Rube Goldberg contraptions adding to the visual
clutter, confusion and my anger.
Which leads to my second major complaint- the movie cannot
decide on a tone. The film jumps back and forth between silly humor and harsh
violence and seems to have no idea these two things don't belong together. How
could a group of smart people think that a scene in which a man carves the
heart out of another man's chest and eats it should be followed up by a scene
in which Tonto jokes around with a horse over the man's grave? Yeah, Johnny
Depp's delivery is funny as he speaks to the possibly supernatural horse but
what are these two scenes doing in the same film? Were two different scripts
mashed together?
Which leads me to my third problem- why is there a
supernatural horse running around this movie? This beast at one point is
standing in a tree and repeatedly magically appears where ever it seems most
convenient for the plot. The idea is that the Ranger's survival of the ambush
that killed the other Ranger's with which he was travelling is a miracle caused
by the gods. What?
Why do this? Why can't it just be that he was left for dead
and lived because he was found and nursed back to health by Tonto? What is
wrong with that story? Why complicate the tale for no good consequence? Adding
a supernatural element is pointless and
irritating. Its as if the filmmakers didn't trust the story they were telling
and decided to add a lot of nonsense to it to make it more 'interesting'.
And why is the character played by Helena Bonham Carter in
this film? She serves next to no function and her steam punk inspired false leg
is just more pointless silly filigree on an over decorated set. Ugh. I could go
on and complain about the stupid CGI aided stunt work that makes every action
scene unbelievable and cartoonish but I'm sick of this thing. They should have
made THE Lone Ranger film but they blew it and in the process they have set the
character back to zero again. Thanks Hollywood.
Fail!
