Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, William Fichtner
I’m more than a little disappointed in Disney’s Flagship Movie of this summer; for all the money they put into the marketing of this movie, you’d think it would be half decent. Unfortunately, this film seemed less like a worthy adaptation of the hit TV series of Television’s Golden Age, and more like a hollow blockbuster designed to sell toys. John Reid (Played by Armie Hammer) is left for dead after his brother, a Texas Ranger, is murdered in an attempt to capture a criminal. Tonto (Portrayed by Johnny Depp in his 60 millionth character role which requires him to wear an obscene amount of makeup) finds him, and Together They Become the Legendary Lone Ranger and fearless sidekick. This movie moves at a painfully slow pace, picking up at about the half hour mark, and with a total time rounding out at about Two and a Half hours, I wish that I had a fast forward button while watching it in Theaters. The way that the movie is being presented to us is as a story; a little boy wanders into a wild west exhibit and see an Old Man, who is Tonto. This method of exposition is completely unnessesary and would have probably cut out about 30 minutes from the movie. In fact, most of the movie could have been trimmed down to just the action, and would still be a cohesive movie that would be easy to understand, and would still not take away from the story that the final version of the movie as it stands now is telling. All this being said, the Lone Ranger is a visually stunning movie; Gore Verbinski (Director of the Pirates of The Caribbean Trilogy) has the cinematic scope to stretch a mediore script, such as this one, and give it some visual depth. Johnny Depp was decent enough as Tonto, but it truly feels like his performance was Jack Sparrow meets Sterotypical Indian ( NOT Native American, Indian, which is what they call Native Americans in this movie) and the result of the mashup was something that toes the line of being ridiculously racist. All in all, I would reccomend to sit this one out this summer.