THE LONE RANGER
Release Date: 9 August 2013
Director: Gore Verbinski
Running Time: 149 Minutes
Starring: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner, Ruth Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter
Screening Reviewed: London Press Screening
Reviewed by Kyle Pedley
When is a Pirates of the Caribbean movie not a Pirates of the Caribbean movie?
The answer, it seems, is when the same creatives and talent come back together to give the same tired routine a fresh coat of paint and pass it off as something else - bastardising another, albeit admittedly mostly-forgotten, franchise from yesteryear in the process.
A cynical overview that may perhaps be, and in fairness The Lone Ranger team certainly do a stellar job in grounding their usual narrative tropes and visual excesses through a wholly convincing Wild West filter. However, there is just far too much repetition of what has come before and a complete failure or dogged refusal to learn from mistakes such as the over-indulgence and tonal mess of the Pirates sequels in particular. Much of the fault has to be leveled at writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, whose screenplay and storytelling for Lone Ranger seems stuck firmly on Pirates autopilot. It isn’t the finest film critique practice to review one movie almost exclusively by comparison to another, but here the similarities are so overt and overbearing it’s almost impossible not to. Remember that old chestnut of having multiple characters pointing guns at one another and shifting allegiances at the drop of a hat? Prepare to welcome it back in The Lone Ranger. How about the finale of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End with two ships crashing and colliding with one another as characters leap from one to another and cross-engage in increasingly silly and heightened action set pieces? Replace them with runaway mine trains and you’ve got your ending here. And do I really need to go anywhere near the bleedingly obvious Jack Sparrow/Tonto analogies? Regardless, on top of a whole swathe of Pirates paste jobs, Lone Ranger also compounds its’ uninspired casting laziness by shoehorning in the fantastic Helena Bonham Carter, Depp’s proudest alumnus from his ‘make it big playing the same character for a decade’ school, but at least sees fit to bump up the ridiculousness of her character by giving her a wooden leg-cum-shotgun.
