Don’t believe what you’ve heard, The Lone Ranger is quite terrific. It is something of a glorious mess; there is so much going on, and it is a rich and interesting film, asking more questions and demanding more imagination than the average summer junk film. If anything, it’s a film crammed with too many ideas rather than just bland CGI action effects. Though it will not be to everyone’s taste, I recommend it highly, despite its many failings. Where to begin? The film opens in 1933 at a carnival, where a child obsessed with the radio Lone Ranger finds the now-ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp, in the most interesting performance of his career) in the sideshow. Tonto, in his dotage, initially thinks the boy is the Ranger himself, but, once he is set right, tells the boy the story of how he and the Lone Ranger came to be. Just as science fiction is always about the present and never really about the future, the Western film is always about the modern world and not our mythic past. Each generation gets the Western it deserves, and The Lone Ranger does not paint a pretty picture of America in 2013. The Ranger comes to learn that the rule of law does not hold for Big Business or the military, and that the lives of the poor or disenfranchised are considered exploitable and expendable by the establishment. Tonto presses the mask upon the Ranger throughout the film, but it’s only when the Ranger realizes that there is plenty of law but very little justice that he decides to embrace it. “If this is the law,” he says, “then I guess I’ll be an outlaw.” For all of its faults – and there are many – this is a fascinating funhouse mirror of the Western myth as filtered through hundreds of other movies. It is such a rich and multi-layered film that I would heartily recommend.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 15:04:40 +0000