10/3/2023 0 Comments Did johnny depp ruin lone ranger![]() ![]() Helena Bonham Carter is now veteran enough an actor to play the limping madam of Ye Old Wild West Brothel, but the movie can’t match even her dementia. The movie teems with corruption and sadism, but you never feel the evil. One of his hairy young henchmen dresses like a baby doll because, you know, queers. Fichtner, for instance, has a messed-up mouth whose crowning feature is a permanently visible gold front tooth. The assortment of bad guys signifies movie villainy. This isn’t the complete disaster of Wild Wild West, but that’s only because none of the $250 million was spent to turn Kenneth Branagh into a mechanical spider. Yet it’s such a generic contraption that all you see are the cranks, pulleys, and gears. That finale is the playful Saturday-matinee stuff of the original Lone Ranger radio and television shows. He seems to like toys far more than the people scattered among them. Movies concocted for everybody risk boring a lot of people, and Verbinski, working again with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, isn’t the kind of director who does well when the camera isn’t following a body as it plummets over the side of a boat or into a cart of rocks. And given the movie’s near-Bollywood length, you can imagine other moviegoing cultures seeing the talking as a cue, say, to pee or hit the concession stand before the finale’s literal and figurative train wreck. Excusing the sound design, the finale is an ear-splitting silent movie. People look at state-of-the-art mega-productions like this and assume that the dialogue and characterizations are as broad as they are because the movie has to sell action sequences that play well in movie theaters all over the world. I also looked over at her hoping for an answer to who this movie’s even for. More than once I looked over at the friend I brought to make sure she was still alive. I don’t know whether my intent is to change the channel or fast-forward or hit stop, but for long stretches of this movie I felt the urge to reach. Every once in a while I’ll be at a movie and find myself reaching for the remote. There are too many scenes involving the dead brother’s dull wife (Ruth Wilson) and their young son (Bryant Prince) holed up with the mean, old train tycoon (Tom Wilkinson). The undifferentiated mess that follows strains the capacity to care. A boy dressed in a Lone Ranger mask and cowboy hat happens upon a wizened Indian (Depp) standing in a portion of an Old West diorama titled “The Noble Savage.” The Indian comes to life and proceeds to spin a yarn of how in 1860s Texas, when his skin was firmer and his posture more erect, he met a prosecutor named John Reid (Hammer) and saved his life after a nut-job outlaw (William Fichtner) shot Reid and Reid’s brother (James Badge Dale) and carved out the latter’s heart. Before that, there’s the attempt at mythos. You’re given a plot in which iconic characters created in the 1930s return seemingly because someone thought it’d be fun to stage a long, climactic sequence on two speeding trains. As much as you’d like to say that the story of an uptight, masked lawman who teams up with a delusional Comanche in the name of justice is a fine seed from which to sow a visual-effects blockbuster, you also know this might be a lie. Gore Verbinski directed the film, for which three men received writing credit - Justin Haythe, and Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, a pair who wrote the first Shrek and Pirates movies. You hate to think that all anyone involved with this movie thought was Pirates! Pirates! Pirates!, and there you are thinking exactly that. ![]() You hate to watch a movie like this because its makers assume that the ideal audience enjoys being treated as if it were a packing peanut. You hate to watch a movie like The Lone Ranger if it makes a movie like World War Z seem profound, and it does. There’s money to spend and Johnny Depp to spend it on. It should not see the fraught historical relationship between Native Americans and white people as the perfect occasion to test a new theme-park ride. It should not spend a reported $250 million to feature a plot in which a railroad tycoon looks to bilk magnates of their millions. No 149-minute Western should feature more close-ups of timepieces than of horses or human beings. For it is awful and profligate, brainless and eternal, loud and cruel, a movie but not. And even though much of what there is to see here is handsome-looking - the mountainside horse trots the swinging, swooping crane shots the delicate balance of light from many sources, including the dental work of Armie Hammer - you hate to behold it. You often can’t see the makeup for the movie that contains it. The Tonto that Johnny Depp plays in The Lone Ranger is covered in hardened, cracking war paint. ![]()
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