BEFORE: I got a late start this morning, because I was out late last night at a rock concert (remember them?) featuring the bands REO Speedwagon and Chicago. I'm a big REO fan from way back, and this was only the second time I've been able to see them live - and my wife's more of a Chicago fan, so this was a great compromise night out. The staging was really smart, because each band played a shortened set, and then both bands came back to do six songs together, three big hits from each band. This meant that people who were there to see just one of the bands couldn't duck out early, or they'd miss the combined supergroup encore. Also, from a musical standpoint, this was a new way to present songs that fans had heard umpteen times before - but they'd never heard REO perform with a horn section before, or Chicago with extra guitars added. It ended up being a clever way to re-package old material in a new fashion.
Linking from "Don Juan De Marco", Johnny Depp carries over.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Legend of the Lone Ranger" (Movie 890)
AFTER: Speaking of re-packaging old material, this is a story told several times before, the origin story of the Lone Ranger. This "bombed" in theaters last year, but I guess when Disney spends $215 million making an epic Western, that's a huge roll of the dice, so when a film "only" makes $89 million in box office, that's a flop. But to a film with a budget of $20 or $30 million, that would be a huge success. So it's all relative. The director has stated that he thinks this film will be considered a classic someday, after years on cable I guess, and the critics will eventually be proven wrong. That's a great strategy, if your film fails, blame the critics. Because there's no way they'll hold a grudge against you when your next film rolls out.
I'm going to put the blame for this film's failure back on the director, Gore Verbinski, because he also directed those "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, and this film seems to be plagued with many of the same problems as the latest "Pirates" films - namely, that there's just too much going on. Your average "PoTC" film has about three sailing ships, 4 or 5 items that everyone is looking for (Davy Jones' heart, the compass, the Fountain of Youth, various maps and chests) and about 17 interested parties, with alliances changing back and forth quite liberally.
This film suffers from the same story problems - too many characters, too many secret alliances between those characters, and too many macguffins - items that people are trying to gain control of. There's the traditional railroad "land grab", a silver mine, Tonto's quest to destroy the "wendigo", plus the Lone Ranger's quest to bring Butch Cavendish to justice. Alliances are constantly shifting as different parties work to bring about various results, and if some of the elements could have been stripped down, or a few of the reversals dispensed with, this story could have been much simpler, and the running time could have been trimmed down closer to two hours. If anything killed this film, it's the running time - 2 hours and 27 minutes? Ridiculous.
Now, about the framing device. The story is told by an aged Tonto to a young boy in a San Francisco fair exhibit in 1933. (Assuming the character was 20 in 1869, this would make him 84 - OK, I'll allow that.) But the question then becomes, why is the story being told in 1933, especially when our audience is in 2014? Why have a framing device at all, set in a particular random year, unless it's to cover up the fact that the story, by itself, wasn't strong enough, or was confusing in some way. The fact that Tonto skips around in time with an occasional flash-forward or memory lapse could be covering up a lot - and just because the young boy he's talking to points out the continuity errors, that doesn't make up for the fact that there ARE continuity errors. For example:
NITPICK POINT: The driving of the Golden Spike, uniting the Transcontinental Railroad, took place at a specific place, which is Promontory Summit, Utah. That's a fixed historical event - this film got the year right, but moved it to Texas, where the Texas Rangers were (Lone Ranger, get it?). IMDB does not regard this as a goof, but instead as an "artistic liberty". To me, this is a mistake, you can't rewrite history for the convenience of your screenplay. To make matters more confusing, much of this film was shot in Utah, Monument Valley to be specific, just because it has a better Western look than modern-day Texas does. So, is this story set in Texas, Utah, or both? They say Texas, but if you were looking to connect Kansas City and San Francisco by rail, it doesn't make much sense to lay track through Texas. By extension, if you don't count this as a "goof", then you also have to accept "Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" as historical fact.
NITPICK POINT #2: There's something weird about the way the desert animals are acting, from the aggressive bunny rabbits to the swarming scorpions, to the intelligent horses. This seems to be tied to the "evilness" that Tonto has attributed to the Butch Cavendish character - we're told that "nature is out of balance". But later, we're told that Tonto suffers from delusions, and that the person he's tracking may not be a demon after all. OK, that may be, but then how do you explain the savage bunnies? Several people saw them, so they can't be tied to one man's delusion. Either something demonic is going down, or it's not. You can't have it both ways - "oh, this thing MIGHT be happening" - at some point you've got to pick a horse, and ride it.
This is sort of endemic of the whole film, with the ends justifying the means. We need the railroads to unite in Texas, so let's just move that event there. We need THIS person to be able to get from THIS moving train to THAT moving train, so let's make one conveniently pass over the other, so he can jump between them. There's a part in one of the "Pirates" films where two characters end up having a sword fight on a giant water wheel (or something) as it rolls down a hill at a furious speed, and they manage to run at just exactly the right speed to maintain a position on top of it, or barring that if one of them falls, he lands INSIDE the wheel, so that the fight can continue. It's far-fetched at best, and just because you CAN make it happen with today's VFX, that doesn't mean that you SHOULD, because the more unlikely you defy the physics of the situation, the more you lose the audience's suspension of disbelief.
In "Lone Ranger", a character manages to balance a ladder on top of a moving train, which just HAPPENS to snag a bucket of tools as it spins, and this bucket just HAPPENS to be the perfect weight to counter-balance his own, so it sends him, perched on the other end, across a ravine to land perfectly on another moving train (both trains are out of control, but somehow they manage to match speeds magically for the duration of the stunt.) Oh, I forgot, first it snags ANOTHER character, making the other end of the ladder too high, but then as he gradually falls off, our hero is gradually lowered to exactly where he needs to be, seconds before the ladder is smashed to bits by a tree. Shenanigans, across the board.
The character who pulls this off is Tonto, who seems to be an expert acrobat, expert tracker, escape artist, shaman, philosopher, crazy person, train engineer, friend, enemy, storyteller - whatever the script calls for him to be at any given moment, he's that. But this is a problem, because if he's everything at once, he ends up being a complete enigma, essentially a blank. The critics at first seem to applaud that Tonto would have the stronger role here, to be the brains of the operation, like the way Kato was in "Green Hornet" - perhaps the critics were disappointed that he turned out to not be the mastermind that he could have been. Instead, who planned the best escapes, came to the most rescues, and seemed to have the most control of every situation? That would be Silver, the Lone Ranger's horse. Let me repeat that: the HORSE turns out be the brains of the team, more often than not. What does that say about the other characters?
Getting back to the trains for a second, there's a part in the first major action sequence where a train memorably runs off its track and crashes in the desert. This is a stunt repeated in at least four incarnations during the film - OK, one time it's a toy train, but when you're worried about what the critics are going to say about your film, maybe repeating the "train running off the rails" visual metaphor is a little ill-advised. This screenplay itself runs off the rails and crashes at least four times itself.
Also starring Armie Hammer (last seen in "The Social Network"), William Fichtner (last seen in "Drive Angry"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Cassandra's Dream"), Ruth Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Howards End"), Barry Pepper (last seen in Seven Pounds"), James Badge Dale, Bryant Prince, Mason Cook, with cameo from Stephen Root (last heard in "Rango"), Rance Howard,
RATING: 4 out of 10 pocket watches
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