With no trace of the freshness and wit Verbinski and Depp brought to the swashbuckler in their original ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, ‘The Lone Ranger’ is content to simply pull another western trope out of the bag – the honky-tonk whorehouse, the ranch raid, the cavalry charge – give it a CGI spit-and-polish, and chuck it in the general direction of the audience. More notably, the film is bookended by a pair of absolutely crackling runaway train action sequences, arguably director Gore Verbinski’s best since ‘Mousehunt’.īut it’s nowhere near enough to sustain us through the slow patches. Depp’s Tonto may sail close to racial caricature, but his performance is enjoyably robust and deadpan. ‘The Lone Ranger’ is by no means a total disaster. Tonto rescues the Ranger from certain death at the hands of potentially supernatural villain Butch Cavendish (an underused William Fichtner), and together they ride for revenge. Johnny Depp plays Tonto, now an old man reminiscing about his days with the titular lawman, played by six-foot personality vacuum Armie Hammer. For the majority of its totally unnecessary 149-minute running time, ‘The Lone Ranger’ is a prime example of how not to go west: it’s predictable, derivative and at times quite spectacularly boring. But take it lightly, and all you’re left with is a bunch of silly hats, sweaty horses and tired old matinee clichés. Treat the genre with respect – as John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and even Quentin Tarantino found – and the Wild West can be one of cinema’s most unpredictable and exciting landscapes. I just saw the 2013 Disney version, the original 1949 Enter The Lone Ranger and The Legend Of The Lone Ranger all in the same week. Much to my suprise it's still just as cool, respectful and loyal to the Lone Ranger as I remembered it being. Making a western is trickier than it looks. I hadn't seen it since the 1980's when HBO would show it all the time so I decided to watch it again.
0 kommentar(er)
