The Loon 'Ranger'

by Brett Parker

It’s pretty obvious that Disney wants to do with The Lone Ranger what it did successfully with Pirates of the Carribean: take a halfway-recognizable brand name attached to a popcorn genre and interject it with an offbeat Johnny Depp performance and all the big-budget blockbuster fixings of our current era.  But while pirate flicks form a B-movie genre no one really thinks too hard about, the western film is one of the most enduring, beloved, and analyzed of all American genres.  So one of the strangest things about this new Lone Ranger is its indecisiveness about whether to honor the innocence of the source material or acknowledge the entire history of true grit westerns that have flourished between then and now.  We can sense the filmmakers trying desperately to bridge the gap between the two opposing ideals, and while the finished film doesn’t reconcile itself into a powerful whole, I must admit that the wild west antics I saw on screen is far more interesting than the typical disposable summer fare that can numb one’s brain.  

In 1869 Texas, we meet John Reid (Armie Hammer), a lawyer who has traveled to the town of Colby to visit his older brother, Dan (James Badge Dale).  Dan is a Texas Ranger who sets out with his comrades to capture the nasty outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Ficthtner) and his gang.  Thinking he can be of assistance, John asks to join the Rangers in tracking down Butch, and Dan deputizes him with a badge and allows him to tagalong on an expedition to find the evil outlaw.  But soon into their journey, Butch ambushes the rangers and all of them die a violent death.  

Soon after this deadly attack, a mysterious Comanche indian named Tonto (Johnny Depp) discovers the bodies of the Rangers and finds that Silver, a white spirit horse thought to be sacred with the Comanche, has revived John back from the dead.  Tonto explains to John that he is now a “spirit walker,” one who has been to the other side and cannot be killed.  Grasping his second chance at existence, John seeks to avenge his brother’s death and enlists Tonto to help him.  The Indian agrees, but only if John wears a mask to prevent his identity so those who think he is dead will continue to do so.  This gives John the new identity of The Lone Ranger, a ghostlike lawman whose thirst for justice leads him not only towards Butch, but a shady railroad tycoon named Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) who is conducting a sinister conspiracy that reveals painful trauma from Tonto’s past and threatens the family of John’s deceased brother.

One of the more distinct and unsettling things about The Lone Ranger is its tonal identity crisis which veers between slapstick comedy and dark western grit.  One moment, Tonto will be having a silly moment with a dead bird resting on top of his head, while the next moment finds Butch cutting out the organs of another man and eating them (off-camera, thank God).  I never thought I’d ever see a Hannibal Lecter moment in a Disney movie, and for that matter, I never thought I’d see Disney foot the bill for a shotgun marriage between a Martin-Lewis comedy and a Cormac McCarthy novel, but such are the wonders of life.  Yet if you’ve been watching Gore Verbinski’s movies all along, you’d know that creating uneasy balancing acts between ridiculousness and disparity has always been his M.O.  Just think of how you couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry while watching The Weather Man or the way jarring violence kept bringing the sweeter parts of The Mexican to a standstill.  Hell, even the Pirates of the Caribbean  movies had fearful thoughts about isolation and change lurking beneath the Hollywood busywork.  Absurd silliness and crushing misery co-existing in the same movie sounds like a strange concept until you catch on that life itself can often play out in that same way.

The only reason we’re even looking at a modern day update of The Lone Ranger in the first place is because Johnny Depp wanted to use his box office clout to create a populist western that illuminates the plights of Native Americans across U.S. history.  So the thing I admire most about the movie is how major plot developments bring considerable insight into tragic ordeals that Native Americans actually faced.  While the script lifts from older, better westerns to help get this point across, it’s still good to see these brutal truths given attention in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster tent-pole flick.  Most will probably have an awfully hard time swallowing the irony of the Disney corporation constructing a mass entertainment that frowns down upon big corporations, but I find it pretty damn funny how Johnny Deep used his star power to make a big capitalist entity point out the evils of big capitalism.

It quickly becomes apparent that the idea of Depp willing this movie into existence is far more interesting than his idea of an updated Tonto.  Depp’s objective was to give Tonto more prominence and personality than he’s been given in the past, making him just as heroic and independent as The Lone Ranger himself.  Yet Depp’s knack for exposing an independent character’s inner-weirdness and allowing their freak flag to fly puts a damaging hindrance on this western sidekick’s impact.  By making the Comanche warrior a crackpot misfit with slapstick tendencies, it’s obvious that Depp is trying to inject that old Jack Sparrow outcast appeal into the role, but it doesn’t create a dynamite hero Native Americans can be proud of.  I’m not saying that Native Americans are humorless people, but making Tonto a goofy loon isn’t really liberating the character from the numbskull stereotypes they've been plagued with throughout Hollywood history.  Perhaps if Depp played him straight, making him a proud thinking-man’s warrior, he could’ve honored his ancestors better while delivering one of his electric dramatic performances a’la John Dillinger.  Oddly enough, the straight-arrow Armie Hammer turns out to be the ace here, even as the script tries to damper-down his white-bred heroics.  The joke is that The Lone Ranger isn’t as knowledgable or savvy a western figure as myth would have you believe, but Hammer has a gift for making cracks in a golden boy image work to his advantage.  The way he overcomes shy-guy shakiness and bumbling inadequacies to fully honor the mythic character’s heroic ideals is very impressive.

Since we're on summer blockbuster territory here, you can bet that this flick ends with the expected pull-out-all-the-stops action finale.  But as far as these things go, it's more efficiently-staged than usual.  Instead of just being a mish-mash of explosions and fury, Verbinski actually puts his Jerry Bruckheimer-meets-Buster Keaton sensibilities to good use like he did in the better parts of Pirates of the Caribbean.  The result makes for plucky action that represents the one moment in the film that connects the strongest with the innocent charms of the older Lone Ranger adventures.  As the movie’s plot chugged along, I considered myself mildly amused by it all, but once the "William Tell Overture" started playing on the soundtrack and Hammer got on his literal high horse to ride off into this action climax, my inner-child actually got pretty damn excited the way he used to for Disney adventures of yesteryear. 

The history of classical pulp heroes points out that The Green Hornet is actually a descendant of The Lone Ranger, with both heroes sharing the surname of "Reid."  So it's worth noting that the modern-day cinematic updates of both those heroes weren't content to just convey the simple pleasures of their modest myths, but basked their adventures in post-modern irony and jazzed-up action adrenaline.  The sad truth is that if these updates stayed ultra-faithful to the classical feel of their heroes' origins, it probably wouldn't grab the attention of most modern moviegoers.  Yet the beauty of molding a pop hero towards the changing times they show up in is how shrewd a marker of culture it can serve as.  Just ponder the contrast between the campiness of the 1960's Batman TV show and the ultra-grittiness of the Dark Knight's recent big-screen outings, and you'd have enough material for endless college essays.  So while many may shake their heads at the dizzying tone and over-the-top action of the 2013 Lone Ranger, you have to keep in mind that it’s a testament to the entertainment era we're living in.  You may be complaining now, but there may come a time in the distant future where you'll look back with a smile and say "now THAT'S how they used to make them!"