Oh, Johnny Depp He had us eating from his palms. We hardcore movie buffs loved what he stood for. There was a too-pretty-to-be-true movie star who, instead of gravitating towards safe choices, built an entire career out of hiding his face behind funky make-up and facial hair. Even once he became the centerpiece of a blockbuster franchise, with Pirates of the Caribbean, it was in a role that it’s hard to imagine any other star would touch, let alone play the way that he touched and played it.
But of late from Alice in Wonderland to The Rum Diary, he’s grown too much into the romance with his weirdness. His performance in The Lone Ranger, while having many other things wrong with it, maybe single-handedly the most consistently grating thing in it and the key to why it’s such a miserable experience along with The Rum Diary.
He participates in the misguided outlining which is set in 1933 San Francisco, where the older Tonto (Depp) narrates to a kid how he met John Reid (Armie Hammer) in 1869 Texas. A fussy man, Reid is an attorney who arrives at a small railroad community where his brother, a Texas Ranger named Dan (James Badge Dale), is now wed to John’s childhood sweetheart, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson). However, when a brutal criminal, Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), breaks out of prison, Dan and John set out on a quest for him with a posse and the end result will turn John and Tonto into reluctant allies, with John wearing a black mask and riding a white horse.
The Lone Ranger is the latest joint effort of Depp and director Gore Verbinski, who directed Depp in the last three Pirates movies and the quirky animated Western Rango. It is hard not to feel a sense of desperation as they attempt to recapture the comic-adventure magic of their previous works. At least for a few precious minutes near the end of the movie, they pull it off when the finale features two trains moving dangerously close to each other for an impressive bit of meticulously choreographed shoot-em-up, which is certain to debut at a Disney theme park near you.
Regrettably, that final set-piece emerges only after having sat through 149 minutes of complete swampland. Verbinski and his set of screenwriters composed an entire story devoid of any serious elements assuming (probably rightly) that a straightforward heroic take on such an iconic character would be too mainstream for the audiences of 2013. There are repeated attempts at crafting something that resembles character arcs, but in the end, there is no point caring about it, not in the bond between John and Dan, nor in whatever separates John from Rebecca, nor how John turns into a gun-hating John Locke-who is seriously withdrawn, nor in the tragedy that fuels Tonto. It is all just filler content and that’s something this front-loaded device certainly doesn’t require.
Next there’s Depp, who you know would insult cinema with his portrayal of Tonto, to begin with. Regardless of your opinion on a white man portraying a Comanche, Depp’s Tonto would be an insult to the art of cinema. It’s a role the character fills by treating everything with complete contempt and looking as if he is shocked by everything around him. Verbinski misses 0 opportunities to show us his reaction takes and to make sure we don’t miss the overarching madness within the film, in which we are expected to pretend that everything we are seeing makes sense. Appearing deranged, and a feeding post-traumatic stress case having a dead bird suspended around your neck, Tonto relies on Depp to take a ridiculous stance with the character. The result is a character who is reduced to nothing but a mindless collection of out-of-place jokes, Twitches, and ticks in the form of an Ancient American.
What makes The Lone Ranger such an absolute disaster considering some of the Pirates movies found success using more or less that same formula? It is because, in those movies, Jack Sparrow had ghost ships and sea monsters to react to. The vague hand-waving here to the idea that The Lone Ranger actually has some sort of mystical powers doesn’t fill the same void. Tonto isn’t a means to deliver broad mugging and wisecracks because it makes sense he’s a means to deliver broad mugging and wisecracks because that is all Johnny Depp seems to be capable of investing in a character anymore.
Then again, maybe The Lone Ranger is loud, chaotic, and fundamentally inconsequential, but so are a lot of summer movies. Perhaps this one along with Depp’s performance is so certain they are wonderfully nonchalant instead of something that is smirking for two and a half hours at its jokes.
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