Verdict:
If you can remove a part of your screenplay and not lose any context, then you should probably remove it. Someone forgot to proofread this otherwise promising movie.
Let’s start with the elephant standing in the corner over there, the one with its face painted and feathers sticking out of it. If you have a problem that the Indian Tonto is portrayed ridiculously by a white dude then you would of course not watch this movie, for you know from the trailer or the posters of the movie that this is how one of the main characters is going to look and if you then still proceed to watch the movie then you only have yourself to blame. Yes, it’s neither a historically accurate nor respectful look, but there are bigger fish to fry.
Now, for those who do not have their head stuck in their politically correct rear ends, the film is not as bad as the critics made it out to be. For one, the cinematography and music in this film are great. The desaturated sun rays piercing through the cracks in the wood, the open sky, the dust and the texture of the withered faces make for great Western atmosphere.
There IS some excellent acting in this movie. William Fitchner makes for a scary bad guy and James Badge is really good as the Lone Ranger’s brother. Quite frankly, if they took the two main characters, Lone Ranger and Tonto, out of this movie and found a way to make the story work without then, then the movie would have been much better, because if there is one character who is not very interesting it is the Lone Ranger himself, played by Armie Hammer, and if there is one character who doesn’t work, it is Tonto.
I do not think it is the actors’ fault. For the Lone Ranger, nothing of what he is given to say grants him any depth of character, besides his love of justice. He is supposed to be a morally straight gentleman, but this also makes him bland. The fact that he doesn’t speak as much as the other characters only makes that blandness worse. As for Tonto, Depp’s delivery is odd. Sometimes it works and sometimes he is like a forced parody of himself. It is as if Tonto was a real guy and Depp was making fun of that person for a comedy sketch. He does some slapstick and it goes too far. It crosses the line from stupid fun to just stupid. But someone had to write, direct and then signed off on all this stupidity, so I would blame those people and not the actors.
Except for Helena Carter, perhaps. I don’t really get why she plays the same weird character in every movie, and it is starting to really grind my gears, so I feel like anything else I say about her performance in this movie will be tainted by my bias about the actress, so I will leave it at that.
The critics have spilled their criticism all over this film because it is not intelligent or original enough. It’s Pirates of the Caribbean in the Wild West. Now, they are mostly right. There are scenes and characters that appear to have been inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean and Tonto is of course just a blatant and failed attempt at creating another Jack Sparrow. And at its heart, The Lone Ranger is about people doing slapstick comedy. However, you shouldn’t have a problem with that concept by itself, unless you forgot what fun is. The problem is not with the concept but with the execution.
While the slapstick in the Pirates of the Caribbean was smart, funny and reserved, in the Lone Ranger they botched it up. The silliness goes over the top, crossing the line from silly to stupid repeatedly. It feels like a Charlie Chaplin film crossed with Looney Toons on steroids. The action goes completely off the rails towards the end. The laws of physics do not apply.
The mood is all over the place. It goes from really serious and gruesome moments to silly jokes and back to gruesome again. Dark comedy is nice, but in this case it feels more like 2 or 3 different movies stuffed into one, like 3 different people worked separately on the script and then 3 different people directed the film.
Botched humour aside, I think the anger about this movie is not about it being a bad film, but rather about it not being what it could or should have been. And because certain actors and the cinematography are so good, it makes the stupid stand out so much more by contrast.
At the end of the day, The Lone Ranger is most certainly not an abomination; it is not the end of the world. It is just a silly movie with its fair share of stupid moments and misfired jokes. You can do much worse.