The Lone Ranger
Release Date: July 3, 2013
Watch Date: April 21, 2023
The best time to discover that your husband is not a fan of western movies is probably not twenty minutes into a two and a half hour long western movie. But sometimes, you can't help it. Sometimes, you have to keep prodding him awake until he sits up and actually decides the movie might be worth it. But we got there in the end, and that's all that matters.
This movie checks the very big racist box and that's to be expected. Tonto was never portrayed with the best intentions or intended to be an accurate depiction of a Comanche tribesman. Still, it doesn't matter how good of an actor Johnny Depp is, he probably shouldn't be portraying a famously indigenous character. An indigenous actor could have done just as well, if not better.
Yet, despite that fact - a fact that would normally drive Bob to hating this movie if Peter Pan and Davy Crockett are any indicators, he actually loved this film. Loved it. It's a fantastic balance of humor, of high stakes, of action. There's heart to it, there is the unmitigated evil of humanity and it's worst and greediest. There's a horse that likes to climb things. Which I am very for.
I had only seen this movie once before, back when it first came out, in theatres, and I remembered enjoying it, but not really knowing why I did. I know that for people like my dad, his brothers, it was a very exciting thing, 'The Lone Ranger' coming back to the big screen. A recapturing of childhood games of 'cowboys and indians'. Of deciding who would be Tonto, and who would be the mask of justice.
My only gripe, again, besides Depp's casting - which I will state again should not have happened even if he did play the role extremely well - is the final action sequence. The chase on the train, the ultimate climatic battle, just goes for a little bit too long. It's fun, it keeps you on the edge of your seat, it's very 'Pirates of the Caribbean' with the way the action flows and different characters work together from different points, and it's fun to see how a plan comes together, but by the end of it, you're checking just how long is left in the film. It drags.
Bob would be upset with me if I didn't mention the cinematography, the thing that distinguishes a good film from a great film, and to him, this cinematography is on point. I don't know how much of it is well constructed shots, and how much of it is Bob just being in love with his home country and the gorgeous vistas the wild open south west provides. But they are gorgeous locations, and despite it mostly being set in a desert, the film manages to have colour and variety that I didn't expect it to have.
I enjoy the way the story is told, with an aged Tonto talking to a boy dressed as his old friend. There's an aspect of the man being an unreliable narrator, like in the scene where he's burying bodies and trades an item that he has in the time he's telling the story to a man from the past. Points get left out and the kid has to prompt him into including them. And, the way Tonto leaves the story has you questioning whether or not the exchange really happened, and just what mystical knowledge the character actually had. It's well done, and adds a sort of ethereal quality to a movie which has quite a lot of death, and more cannibalism than you would expect (a trait that gets mentioned and shown once and then never seems to be of much importance than people stating that it does happen).
All in all, this movie is...fun. And we have had a hard month, and we needed a fun movie. Maybe it even changed Bob's opinion on westerns a little bit? Possibly? I hope so, because I'm pretty sure we're going to be watching a lot of them over the course of the next several years. If you want to have fun, if you can set aside the innate knowledge that Depp should not be cast in the role, you too will probably enjoy this film. I'd recommend it, anyways.
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