So last night I watched the Lone Ranger. Peter Travers from
Rolling Stone wrote, "Your expectations of how bad
The Lone Ranger is can't trump the reality," so my expectations were zero. And while there were certainly massive flaws, I actually quite enjoyed it.
I reckon that this flopped for two major reasons.
First, I think that Disney did a bang up job of marketing it. They tried to market it, it seems, to kids and teens, when they should have been marketing it to those of us who grew up watching
The Lone Ranger on TV. Travers writes,
Harsh critics insist it's the film's tonal shifts that destroy it. Ha! Can you imagine a group of nine-year-olds bitching about "tonal shifts"?
The thing is, this isn't a movie that nine-year-olds will primarily enjoy. It's a nostalgic film, much in the vein of
The A-Team, etc.
Second, you know that a film is going to flop in the US when it is released on Independence Day weekend and they dress up a white guy like an Indian telling the story of how the white man oppressed the Indians. I mean, seriously? It seems like they were trying as hard as possible to make Americans feel bad for being American. Genius!
That said, I have grown weary of Depp recently, but he was refreshingly funny in this role. It was like watching Captain Jack Sparrow for the first time. I have no doubt that I'd quickly get bored if there was a sequel (which there probably won't be), but he roused a few genuine laughs. Silver was quite the riot too, actually.
Okay, the film was more Tonto's than the Lone Ranger's, and there are a few complaints about the Ranger's character. It was a little long and dragged a bit in the middle, but the action wasn't in my opinion, over the top (like it was, for example, in
Man of Steel).
What they did really well, I thought, was to keep the story more or less true to the original. And the return of William Tell's Overture was a genius moment of nostalgia. I watched
The A-Team waiting with bated breath for an extended run of the familiar theme music, but it never came. I watched the short-lived reboot of
Knight Rider and found myself distinctly bummed that they changed the theme as drastically as they did. The Overture drumming out during the final train scene was epic!
This is by no means a cinematic masterpiece, and rustypup will hate it, but if you go into it with minimal expectations and with a sense of childhood nostalgia, you may come out the other end pleasantly surprised.