The Lone Ranger Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype

When I was a little girl getting ready for school in the wee hours of the morning, my brother and I would watch re-runs of the classic television series “The Lone Ranger.”  I lived for Walter Sande to say “Hi-Ho Silver…Away,” because for some reason it really use to make me chuckle!  So it suffices to say, I was really hoping this new Disney feature starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer would make me reminisce with much delight.

Let’s start with what I did like.  I enjoyed the effort to explain the origins of  how The Lone Ranger and Tonto became outlaws.  The stunts were breathtaking,  Helena Bonham Carter (Red Harrington) was hysterical and the Hans Zimmer’s soundtrackwas so compelling it made me actually want to run out and purchase it.  Ruth Wilson (Rebecca Reid) as the love interest for both The Lone Ranger/John Reid (Armie Hammer) and his brother Dan Reid (James Badge Dale) seemed to be the only actor whose performance  was grounded from a real organic place.  However, my favorite storytelling element was how a boy dressed as “the lone ranger” on a museum trip at the fair was used to tell the story of the legendary duo from none other than an aging Tonto himself.

Needless to say…I should’ve known something was awry when I saw stills of Johnny Depp being released as Tonto months in advance in white face.  While I respect and admire Depp immensely… just to satisfy my curiosity, I researched hundreds of Comanche Indian pix and NOT ONE showed a warrior in white face. Clearly, this was a character choice, but I found it to be demeaning to Indigenous people making the Comanche tribe look like clowns.

Seeing that, for some reason, the N-word happens to recently be used like a tennis ball in flight, the use of “red-nigga”  by one of the characters didn’t make me feel any warmer about this film, nor did the performance of Armie Hammer.   Some of you may remember young Hammer from “The Social Network” or from the fact that he is a great-grandson of Armand Hammer. While he is beautiful eye-candy, his acting in this film seems very stoic with no real humanity or emotion underneath.

This film often felt like it was about 45 minutes too long and there were numerous scenes where I found myself asking why they were there and what did they have to do with furthering the plot.  THE LONE RANGER is in nationwide release by Walt Disney Studios and directed by Gore Verbinski.