And jokes there are aplenty, many of them riffing on the hoary conventions of the Lone Ranger going back to the Golden Age of Radio: the white horse, the white hat, the black mask, the silver bullet and so on. Some younger audiences might not get all the memes the way those over 50 will, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be more than sufficiently entertained by the Wild West goings-on here. Both Tonto and the Lone Ranger are equal-opportunity wackjobs, each seeing the other through most of the narrative as a loose cannon in need of careful monitoring.
The surprise here is not that Johnny Depp’s trademark pokerfaced mugging is just as effective here as it is when he plays Jack Sparrow (presuming that you like that sort of thing, as I do), but that Armie Hammer – usually cast in patrician prettyboy roles – also has formidable comedic chops. He plays John Reid, the idealistic young lawyer-turned-titular-outlaw-avenger, as a Dudley Do-Right type whose naïve determination to bring the bad guys to justice on a frontier where institutional justice has been hopelessly corrupted makes him seem utterly clueless. We feel for Tonto’s exasperation with him, even as we giggle at the exiled Comanche spirit warrior’s seemingly flaky ritual behaviors, like trying to feed corn to the dead crow perched on his headdress. The main character arc here is the way that their well-deserved mutual mistrust evolves into a comic codependency worthy of a grumpy old married couple. They’re like Butch and Sundance on peyote.
What makes The Lone Ranger more than just a Western screwball comedy is the way in which the darker elements of the story – the bits that seem to have left so many reviewers frustrated at their inability to pigeonhole the movie – create such deep contrasts to the sidekicks’ lighter ongoing repartee. The bad guys are really, really bad. One, as you’ve undoubtedly heard, is a desperado with cannibalistic tendencies, Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) – though it should be noted that the infamous incident in which he eats someone’s heart actually occurs off-camera; we only see reaction shots. It’s actually much less explicitly gory than the heart-ripping-out human sacrifice scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I don’t remember many people criticizing as unsuitable for older children back when it came out.
The other really bad guy is greedy railroad magnate Latham Cole – played with relish by British acting veteran Tom Wilkinson, who was so touching in last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. A villain worthy of our post-bank-failure nightmares, Cole is a man with no scruples whatsoever about staging massacres and fomenting range wars in the pursuit of wealth and what he calls “progress.” It’s his “civilized” behavior, not Cavendish’s grungy sadism, that opens Reid’s eyes to the folly of his reliance on The Law to right wrongs.
The most powerful and disturbing scene in the film is one in which a US Cavalry unit, suborned by Cole to cover his rape of a rich silver lode on Indian lands, pulls out primitive machineguns to mow down a wave of avenging Comanches. The political message is clear and sobering: Rights be damned, none can stand against the ones with the money and the power and the most modern technology. It’s here, and not in Tonto’s sometimes inexplicable antics, where we can find a more enlightened, contemporary view of the plight of the First Nations and the karmic debt that America incurred in its pursuit of so-called Manifest Destiny.
Many of The Lone Ranger’s critics pointed to these sometimes-jarring shifts in tone as evidence of a movie production that had gotten too bloated for its own good; but to this viewer’s eyes, the chiaroscuro approach made the humor funnier and the occasional pathos more touching. Most of the bloat was actually spent on over-the-top action sequences, anyway, generally involving runaway trains. If you enjoyed the outrageous set pieces in the Pirates of the Caribbean series where Captain Jack is swinging around on a giant boom or trying to keep his footing atop a runaway millwheel, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth here.
And I loved that the filmmakers saved the William Tell Overture until nearly the end of the movie, by which time we’ve just about forgotten about that particular Masked Man tradition. It comes in right when we need that final adrenaline rush, its cornball baggage left in the dust by the climactic chase sequence’s sheer momentum. The subsequent cheers from the audience didn’t surprise me in the least; I thought that the movie earned them honestly.
