The Lone Ranger (Movie 2013): Off-Key Johnny Depp

The Lone Ranger movie with Armie Hammer. In relation to its reported $200 million budget (not including marketing and distribution costs), The Lone Ranger turned out to be a major box office bomb in the domestic market ($89.3 million).

The Lone Ranger (movie 2013) review: The latest long-winded Gore Verbinski & Johnny Depp collaboration feels like Pirates of the Caribbean in Western garb

In highfalutin’ acting circles, it’s said that American performers are trained to work from the inside out, crafting a character’s inner life before working on external traits, like voice and clothing. Conversely, British actors are said to work from the outside in, where a character’s clothing, hair, makeup, walk, posture, and even footwear serve as entry points for a characterization.

Guess which of these methods Johnny Depp probably embraces? And, if so, can he stop already? Between the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows, and now The Lone Ranger, Depp’s fondness for playing dress-up is getting him too far away from the days he was considered an actor of serious merit, not just the coolest tentpole star around – though Robert Downey Jr. has arguably stolen that crown.

In The Lone Ranger, Depp plays Tonto, the title character’s Comanche sidekick, with a face full of stone-colored makeup and a dead crow atop his head. Darting his eyes and contorting his face into comical shapes while cracking wise with a slightly overdone injun accent, Depp plays it like a silent film clown. It’s a take on the character that doesn’t serve the movie very well and isn’t particularly focused.

Then again, the entire affair never finds its center, as director Gore Verbinski, the best of the big-budget visual fetishists, can’t decide if he’s making an archetypical Western, an atypical Western, or a full-blown action comedy. Of course, what Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are really making is a quasi-sequel to their massively successful Pirates of the Caribbean series, which is the crux of The Lone Ranger’s problem.

Instead of making something reminiscent of another movie, Verbinski and Bruckheimer should have made something that works on its own terms. The one attribute The Lone Ranger and the Pirates series do share is an unfortunate one: They’re both confused and long-winded slogs.

Titular hero downgraded

Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger is the latest movie based on the exploits of the masked Texas crime fighter who made his debut in a 1933 radio serial, long before sarcasm and irony became the coin of the realm in American culture. So from the outset, it’s questionable whether an upright lawman of sincerity and rectitude would even resonate with today’s jaded audiences.

Verbinski’s solution is for Armie Hammer to play the part as a dull, dweeby, and violence-averse target for Depp’s verbal depredations. In other words, in the movie that bears his name The Lone Ranger is reduced to being the sidekick to the sidekick.

Hammer, best known as both Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network, is an actor of considerable handsomeness and vertical length. Here he’s game for anything, including being dragged through a pile of horse manure and getting buried up to his neck in dirt. On the downside, Hammer lacks the charisma to share the screen with Johnny Depp and has trouble navigating the various tones that Verbinski can’t decide between.

The Lone Ranger with Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp. Internationally, The Lone Ranger collected $171.2 million; its worldwide total was $260.5 million – far below what it needed (after exhibitors’ cut of the box office gross) to recoup its exorbitant cost at theaters.

Cracked & bloated

The tone of The Lone Ranger’s opening suggests we’re in for something frisky and cracked (like Verbinski’s superior revisionist Western, Rango), but also bloated and too densely plotted (like the Pirates of the Caribbean series).

Establishing the film’s unnecessary flashback structure, a young boy in 1933 visits an Old West carnival exhibit in San Francisco. There he encounters an elderly Tonto (Johnny Depp in old-age makeup), who springs from a Noble Savage diorama to regale the kid with the long-ago story of meeting by-the-book prosecutor and future Lone Ranger John Reid (Armie Hammer).

This being a film co-written by the Pirates duo of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (along with Justin Haythe), needless complications quickly drain the fun out of The Lone Ranger. Yet the 19th-century set-up is encouraging.

The hunt

A train bound for Colby, Texas, carries earnest, bumbling Reid and two prisoners: The villainous Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner, nailing it) and a certain Comanche Indian. When Cavendish escapes and the train crashes spectacularly, Tonto disappears while Reid is deputized by his lawman brother, Dan (James Badge Dale), to help him find the snaggletoothed outlaw.

During their pursuit, the Cavendish gang stages a surprisingly brutal ambush where Dan is killed and John is left for dead. Tonto turns up to revive John, proclaim him an invincible spirit walker (complete with spirit horse), and fashion him a black mask made from Dan’s clothing.

Together they hunt for Butch, a quest reminiscent of John Ford’s The Searchers, another Western about a man trying to find his brother’s killer while harboring deep feelings for his brother’s wife. (Dan’s wife and the object of John’s affection is played by Ruth Wilson, who’s spunky but overmatched by the film’s sheer size.)

Railroad motif

Gore Verbinski fills The Lone Ranger with ticklish insider references to other classic Westerns, even giving a nod to Johnny Depp’s 1995 oater Dead Man. As usual, the director also busts out the crane shots – and it’s always a kick to see how his latest swooping camera move will reveal detail and add spikes of humor. The flip side is that Verbinski will indulge any plot complication as long as it results in another action sequence.

John and Tonto’s search for Cavendish often takes them to a railroad track, railroad tunnel, or railroad train, where a loud and kicky set piece awaits its cue. In fact, six miles of track and two locomotives were constructed just to add authenticity to The Lone Ranger, even though there’s so much CGI anyway that they might as well have saved themselves the effort.

Still, it’s a refreshingly old-fashioned approach that’s mischievously appropriate considering the story is built around railroad expansion, here spearheaded by railroad tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson). Cole initially claims his expansion plan will honor the treaty between the White man and the Native American, only to change his mind later, with violent results.

The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp as Tonto. The Lone Ranger ended up becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of Depp’s career.

Clownish Native American portrayal

Indeed, The Lone Ranger will be measured partly by how it treats its Native American characters.

Johnny Depp has noted in interviews that he wanted the film to return some dignity to the United States’ indigenous people. But that’s just a talking point for the promotional circuit. A flashback recalling the tragic event in Tonto’s childhood that explains his motivation (and possible his kooky behavior) is historically plausible, but means little once he starts feeding the dead crow on his head and prancing around like, well, Jack Sparrow.

That’s not to say the Comanches in The Lone Ranger should be treated with solemn reverence – lest, at the very least, we lose the movie’s funniest line, spoken by the head of the Comanche tribe. That is to say, however, that Depp’s Buster Keaton-esque imagining of Tonto does the character and his heritage no favors.

Wasted money

Now, even if Johnny Depp played Tonto with less winking and less quirk, that wouldn’t forgive a basic miscalculation in remaking Pirates of the Caribbean as a Western: Pirate tales can better accommodate campiness, whimsy, and flights of visual fancy.

Swashbuckling pirates seem more fictional, the subjects of tall tales beloved by children and read under the covers by flashlight. Westerns, on the other hand, are ripped from the nation’s recent, violent, often tragic history. Only a rock-steady vision would have allowed Gore Verbinski to go off the reservation (pun intended) and ask audiences to accept vicious cannibalistic rabbits (don’t ask), silly humor, and dollops of mysticism.

Verbinski’s take features modern sensibilities, modern technology, and modern studio-marketing strategies. As a result, Disney spent over $200 million to prove The Lone Ranger is too old-fashioned for such a newfangled, smart-aleck world.

The Lone Ranger (movie 2013) cast & crew

Director: Gore Verbinski.

Screenplay: Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio.

Cast: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, William Fichtner, Tom Wilkinson, Ruth Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter, James Badge Dale, Bryant Prince, Barry Pepper, Mason Cook, JD Cullum, Harry Treadaway, James Frain, Gil Birmingham, Stephen Root.

Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli.

Film Editing: Craig Wood & James Haygood.

Music: Hans Zimmer.

Production Design: Jess Gonchor & Mark McCreery.

Producers: Gore Verbinski & Jerry Bruckheimer.

Production Companies: Jerry Bruckheimer Films | BlindWink Productions | Infinitum Nihil.

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Running Time: 149 min.

Country: United States.

“The Lone Ranger (Movie 2013): Off-Key Johnny Depp” notes & references

The Lone Ranger box office info via boxofficemojo.com.

The Lone Ranger movie credits via the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog website.

Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp The Lone Ranger movie images: Walt Disney Studios.

“The Lone Ranger (Movie 2013): Off-Key Johnny Depp” last updated in April 2023.