HE RIDES AGAIN! "The Lone Ranger"

Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger scope out Red's bordello for bad guys.

The film "The Lone Ranger," starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, and William Fitchner, was directed by Gore Verbinski.  It features a haunting yet robust score by Hans Zimmer, with beautiful, mesmerizing, panoramic cinematography by a raft of people headed by Bojan Bozelli.  It was supposed to be the No. 1 summer hit; unfortunately, it failed miserably at the box office, bested by "Despicable Me 2".  I do not know why.  Critics were mean and cruel.  Their comments about Depp, hurtful.  Still, none of this kept me away.  I believe in Depp, having seen him in just about everything he's ever made.  I feel he disappointed critics because he didn't play Tonto as Captain Jack Sparrow's lost twin.  Depp created a totally new character in Tonto, which he does in all his films save the "Pirates" franchise.

The film begins and ends with a scene set in a display of old west dioramas at the San Francisco 1933 World's Fair.  A little boy, dressed as the Lone Ranger, checks out a diorama featuring a Native American  habitat on an arid plain, complete with teepee, baskets, tools, bow and arrow an other Indian accoutrements.  A model of an old, withered native with dry, cracked skin, stands in front of his teepee, peering out through the glass as though analyzing the weather.  Suddenly he comes alive when the boy talks to thim.  The boy (and we) learns that he is the real Tonto (Johnny Depp), the Lone Ranger's sidekick. Thus the story begins in flashback.

What binds Tonto and the Lone Ranger is that they are both outcasts.   Tonto was banished from his Comanche tribe as a child for selling out the whereabouts of the silver deposit to a shady silver speculator, Cole, played by British actor Tom Wilkinson, for a silver, engraved pocket watch.  Cole oversees iIlegal mining practices;  he's also a railroad magnate. Texas ranger John Reid (Armie Hammer with the straight, even, too-white teeth), "died" at the hands of creepy, cannibalistic gang leader Butch Cavendish (an amazing, unrecognizable William Fitchner, currently seen in ABC TV's "Crossing Lines").  Butch's gang had wasted Reid's brother, Dan (stoic James Dale) and the other rangers, including, they believed, John, who were hell bent to bring them to justice.

Tonto, with the assistance of a mystical white "spirit" horse (the soon-to-be Silver), "resurrects" John by chanting Comanche prayers over him and sprinkling him with birdseed with which he constantly feeds the dead crow (Depp's idea) perched on his headdress (Tonto's not the ranger's).  Reid certainly cannot show up in town when he's believed dead so Tonto bestows on him the moniker "Lone Ranger" and he swears to never reveal his real identity.  Hence, an outlaw.  Tonto gives him a mask he'd cut out of a dead guy's black leather vest, warning him never to remove it.  Reid somehow finds a pristine white cowboy hat near the bodies, slaps it on and voila! his LR look is complete, even to the badge his bro had given him.

This oater has everything- from inter-Indian battles; Butch's gang impersonating natives and burning villages, harassing, abusing women and children, and scalping so whites will in turn kill innocent Indians; and tribal land treaty betrayals by whites, and, of course, explosions. There's run-away trains carrying terrified, hymn-singing passengers; locomotives pulling gondola cars filled with silver nuggets plunging from burning bridges into a river.  Rebecca Reid (simpering Ruth Wilson), Dan's widow, executes some Perils of Pauline bits.  In one, she hangs off a speeding train by her fingernails, flapping like a flag in a high wind.  (She and John had history before he'd  left for California, so Dan took up the slack.) She has a prepubescent son who ends up getting the legendary silver bullet to the Lone Ranger in the nick of time!

The requisite top-of-the-train chases as it hurtles along includes one of the Lone Ranger on a galloping Silver, either running from or towards the menacing, ever-present villain: evil, scar-faced, stringy haired, determined Butch Cavendish,   Then, there's Cole's political shenanigans about the building of the railroad across the plains, connecting east and west, assisted by Union soldiers, led by Captain Jay Fuller (Barry Pepper).  "If these men represent the law, I'd rather be an outlaw," intones the Lone Ranger.

Helena Bonham Carter as Red Harrington

Helena Bonhom-Carter plays the town Madam, fittingly named Red Harrington, with a messy, out-sized bird's nest of bright red hair.  The interior scene of her ostentatiously tricked-out bordello reminded me of the one in "Gangs of New York"- bawdy, lewd, salacious and raucous.  Her role, typically, is to assist the good guys in every way possible, even employing the weapon hidden in the heel of her red boot on her ivory, artificial leg.

Political, cultural, and social activists, suspend your activism, sit back, relax, and enjoy this rollicking, yet at times, haunting, yarn.

This film could not possibly end without you know what (if you are not up on your Lone Ranger lore, I leave you to discover what that is).  To which Tonto warns sagaciously, "Do not ever say that again."

The Lone Ranger and Silver