The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger - Dir. Gore Verbinski (2013)

Nobody expected Pirates of the Caribbean to be a hit. It was a movie based on a ride at Disneyland. The star, Johnny Depp, was a respected actor, but not a box office draw. Plus, the last pirate movie to hit screens was the abysmal Cutthroat Island, a notorious flop that hastened the demise of Carolco, the production company responsible for Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct. Pirates was not only a triumph, it spawned one of the biggest money making franchises in movie history. Each of the three sequels is ranked in the top 20 of highest worldwide grosses, plus Depp received an Oscar nomination for his memorable portrayal of Capt. Jack Sparrow.

While Hollywood has produced several quality Westerns over the last several years (3:10 to Yuma, Django Unchained), it wasn't a genre considered to be a huge attraction. Disney was looking to change that perception with The Lone Ranger. They put the Pirates band back together including Depp, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinski, composer Hans Zimmer, and screenwriters Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio (with a rewrite by Justin Haythe).

The Lone Ranger and his faithful sidekick, Tonto, debuted on a 1933 radio drama, but his most popular incarnation is the ABC television series that aired from 1949 to 1957 with Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels in the lead roles. The least popular version would have to be The Legend of the Lone Ranger, a live-action film released in 1981 to capitalize on the success of the Superman movies. Legend was a critical and commercial failure and immediately sank the career of its star, Klinton Spilsbury, who never acted again. Spilsbury was no Christopher Reeve. He upset many crewmembers with his egotistical behavior, his drinking, and a mediocre performance that led producers to dub over his voice. Disney's Lone Ranger was also plagued with production woes. Filming was delayed due to the studio wanting to trim the bloated budget of $225 million. They cut it down to a mere $200 million. Not that it mattered because the picture wound up spending the difference and then some. Remember when Westerns didn't cost the GNP of a small country because all you needed was a horse, a desert, and a guy with a gun?

John Reid (Armie Hammer) returns to his dusty hometown of Colby, Texas after studying law back east. His brother, Dan (James Badge Dale), is a member of the Texas Rangers and Colby's primary lawman and is married to John's former girlfriend, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson). Progress is about to transform Colby into a vital hub thanks to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad overseen by tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson). The Reids and a team of Rangers set out into the desert to capture a recently escaped outlaw named Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner). An ambush by Cavendish and his gang leaves everyone dead, except for John who is rescued by Tonto (Depp), a Comanche on his own mission of vengeance.

Anything unique Verbinski and Depp had to say about the Western, they told it all in the delightfully quirky Rango. The Lone Ranger is painfully formulaic in spite of Verbinski quoting from the works of John Ford and Sergio Leone. He even throws in a visual reference to The Flight of the Red Balloon. The beautiful shots of Monument Valley aren't nearly enough to distract from a bloated runtime of nearly two and a half hours. Borrowing from Little Big Man, Verbinski employs a framing device in which an elderly Tonto, posing as a mannequin in a traveling sideshow, recounts his tale to a young boy. These sequences are one of many that attempt to deal with America's bloody history and the indignant treatment of Native Americans, along with Chinese rail workers. However, the movie never digs deeper into those topics because it is a Disney movie. Thus, we get a brutal scene where a Comanche tribe is massacred by machine gun fire that is completely undercut by Laurel & Hardy-style slapstick involving the Ranger and Tonto on a seesaw cart. There's no payoff to the sideshow scenes either. Too bad Sony has the rights to the Green Hornet, otherwise the kid could have been revealed to be Britt Reid, the Hornet's alter-ego and Dan's grand-nephew.

The tonal inconsistencies are a major problem beyond the failed blend of violence and humor. Throughout the picture, the Ranger is a source of derision in spite of the studio's desire to make him into a modern, bad-ass character. There's a constant mocking of the Ranger iconography with people asking, "What's with the mask," as a bad running joke. When the Ranger shouts his catchphrase, "Hi-yo, Silver! Away!," Tonto emphatically tells him to never do it again.

The Lone Ranger falls into the same trap of many origin stories in that the protagonist doesn't become the hero we know until the end. The final act is the best part of the movie with a pair of runaway trains on parallel tracks. It's the same type of outlandish set piece that the Pirates series did so well. The film is almost invigorated when the Ranger's theme, the William Tell Overture, finally kicks in and the masked man rides to the rescue of Rebecca, who is in full Perils of Pauline mode.

Although the movie is entitled, The Lone Ranger, Johnny Depp's Tonto is the obvious star. Depp tries to recapture the magic of Jack Sparrow with another idiosyncratic performance, but there isn't anything particularly memorable about his Tonto. The same goes for Armie Hammer, who was great in The Social Network, but is given nothing but the blandest material to work with. As brothel owner, Red Harrington, Helena Bonham Carter seems to have wandered off a Tim Burton set and is more than welcome though she could have been easily cut.

The Lone Ranger is an indulgent mess that failed to achieve a fraction of the success of the first Pirates movie. In the end, it will go down as another costly failure for Disney alongside Mars Needs Moms and John Carter.

Rating: * ½ (*****)

Rango

Rango - Dir. Gore Verbinski (2011)

Imagine if Hunter S. Thompson and Sergio Leone dropped acid together and had a baby. That mutant freak baby would probably be Rango. Throw in healthy doses of Salvador Dali and Tex Avery and you have an animated film that stands apart from the homogenized CG kids movies flooding multiplexes across the country.

Johnny Depp has been praised for his chameleon-like qualities as an actor so it comes as no surprise when he's called upon to play an actual chameleon. As the titular Rango, he is a pet lizard (with a flair for the theatrical) living inside a glass aquarium struggling to define his own identity. When we meet Rango, he is performing Shakespeare with his only friends a dead fly, a plastic wind-up fish named Mr. Timms, and the naked torso of a Barbie doll. Oh, the movie hasn't even begun to get weird yet.

A car accident sends the aquarium tumbling out of the car where it's smashed into a million pieces across the asphalt road. Rango finds himself lost in the middle of the desert and the first creature he comes across is a Don Quixote-esque armadillo named Roadkill (Alfred Molina). He is so named because he was clearly run over by a car, yet somehow survived. Practically bisected, the poor armadillo still has the tire marks across his flattened stomach. Nope, the movie gets weirder still.

Rango wanders through the scorching desert and finds a dusty Old West town appropriately named Dirt. Through sheer dumb luck, he kills a predatory hawk plaguing the town and re-imagines himself (like any good chameleon) as a deadly gunfighter and becomes the sheriff of Dirt. Rango also romances Beans (Isla Fisher), a desert iguana prone to random spells of catatonia. Her farmland is sought after by the seemingly benevolent Mayor of Dirt, a wheelchair bound desert tortoise voiced by Ned Beatty. It shouldn't be much of a spoiler that the Mayor will be revealed as primary antagonist since Beatty also portrayed the similar Lotso Hugging Bear in Toy Story 3. There's also an owl mariachi band who act as a Greek chorus narrating the journey of Rango.

Rango was produced by Nickelodeon Movies and is the first film fully animated by Industrial Light & Magic with Roger Deakins serving as visual consultant (as he did on Wall-E and How to Train Your Dragon). The animation is impeccable including a gorgeous shot of infinite reflections of the characters inside a giant eyeball. The performances were uniquely captured as well with director Gore Verbinski, working from a script by John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai), using a process he dubbed 'emotion capture.' This is a decidedly low-tech method with the actors performing the scenes on a soundstage. The voices were recorded there and the video tapes were viewed by the animators to properly render movement and facial expressions.

While the majority of animated films tend to look the same, Rango dares to be original. There's no attempt to make the creatures cute and cuddly so the studio can sell them as Happy Meal toys. Even generally adorable animals like rabbits are rendered as mangy oddballs. One character has an arrow going through his eyeball and out the side of his head. Rango himself is hardly the lovable little chameleon from Tangled, his Hawaiian shirt and smashed, lopsided head is meant to evoke the artwork of Ralph Steadman, the long-time collaborator of the late-Hunter S. Thompson.

The subversive humor of Rango is another element that makes the film so successful. The movie is filled with pop culture references which will likely go over the heads of the children in the audience as well as some of the parents accompanying them. Rango makes several references to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas such as the visual callbacks to Steadman and a cameo from two humans resembling Thompson and Dr. Gonzo. The primary plot point of the movie (involving a water shortage) is lifted straight out of Chinatown while much of the imagery is borrowed from iconic Westerns like High Noon, The Wild Bunch, and A Fistful of Dollars while the score by Hans Zimmer is cribbed from the work of Ennio Morricone. Rango's eventually nemesis, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), has a Gatling gun for a tail and a flat-brimmed hat borrowed from Lee Van Cleef. Rango also goes on a vision quest where he meets the Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant) and I won't spoil who he's clearly modeled after.

One spectacular action sequence finds the protagonists riding a wagon and being chased by a clan of rodents riding bats ("We can't stop here. This is bat country!"). Somehow the filmmakers weave together references to Apocalypse Now, The Road Warrior, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars (it is an ILM production). However, none of the references are thrown in simply to show off how clever and hip everyone is. Neither are they Family Guy gags where they pop up randomly and have nothing to do with the plot. The references don't draw attention to themselves so children won't be scratching their heads while those in the know will get an additional layer of joy. The voice acting doesn't draw attention to itself either as the filmmakers chose the best actors, instead of stunt casting A-list talent. This leads to the casting of great character actors like Ray Winstone, Stephen Root, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Rango earned a PG rating and contains some decidedly adult humor. One of the townsfolk mentions how he found a human spinal column in his feces. So parents should be warned in case their child asks them questions about prostate exams.

The year may have barely begun, but Rango is already the frontrunner for Best Animated Film of 2011. With Pixar releasing the anemic looking sequel, Cars 2, it is hard imagine another picture knocking Rango off the pedestal. The fact that a movie so strange and trippy was made in the Hollywood system is astounding. Most likely it exists solely because of Verbinski and Depp's success on the Pirates of the Caribbean series. The story may be familiar, but the film is a unique and witty take on the classic hero's journey.

Rating: ***½ (*****)