Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Johnny Depp, Arnie Hammer, Ruth Wilson, William Fichtner, Tom Wilkinson, Barry Pepper, James Badge Dale, Helena Bonham Carter, Mason Cook, J D Cullum, Saginaw Grant, Harry Treadaway, James Frain, Joaquin Cosio, Damon Herriman, Lew Temple, Leon Ripley, Stephen Scoot.
As American screen heroes go, The Lone Ranger (John Reid), is up there historically with anything that has come around since the end of World War Two from the stalls of both Marvel and D.C Comics and is stark contrast to the gruesome anti-heroes that streaked across celluloid like bugs being let out their traps. The tales that were made famous with gripping radio broadcasts and a cult television programme showed that a man could be on the wrong side of the law without actually breaking it, a hero that despite being left for dead didn’t resort to vengeance, a man who wanted to bring law back to the American West.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and reel in two heavy weight actors and the timing should have been perfect for the stories to reach a new audience, for tales of that time to capture the imagination. However it seems that the off-set problems that have dominated every square inch of the film may have put the kybosh on Americans falling in love with their own history and their own back door again.
With Arnie Hammer taking up the mantle of the masked man and Johnny Depp portraying his faithful friend Tonto, there should have been great excitement but in the end it all seems fairly convoluted and plays around with tropes seen in other films in the last 30 plus years, one section especially was more in keeping as an homage to Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, all you needed was a small American/Chinese boy shouting out Indy and the game would have been up!
The issue of course may lay in the pairing of two fine quality actors who on screen at least didn’t seem to gel or spark in the way that audiences like their buddy-films to do so. For that to happen the actors must be able to relate to each other but with a generation at least between the two men, it is hard to see how that could be thought of being achieved.
Perhaps the problem with The Lone Ranger, lies not with the film itself but with the audiences who don’t or cannot imagine an America in this day in and age without gleaming towers, disease ridden streets, an America devoid of the large expanse of nothingness and big empty skies in which a man can lose himself and the name he has. In the same way that audiences this side of the Atlantic Ocean might struggle with films set completely in the countryside, the world has become too urbanised, too residential, so much so that a hero riding around the wastelands of the American Mid-West just cannot be contemplated.
Whatever the reason, the film isn’t that bad, it has some great flourishes, cinematic beauty and some interesting supporting roles, none so much more keenly played as Tom Wilkinson as the corrupt railroad owner Latham Cole, Saginaw Grant as Chief Big Bear and Ruth Wilson as Rebecca Reid. The way that these three actors portrayed the parts of people who were lost in the expanse, Mr. Wilkinson reverting to the greed of early settlers and destroying the native Americans, the incredible Saginaw Grant who bought the pain of the last 500 years of his proud people to the forefront of the film and the superb Ruth Wilson who showed how merciless the frontier was to women with style and a sense of foreboding.
The Lone Ranger won’t win awards for best film, actor or pretty much anything but by paying homage to the evils inflicted upon the Native Americans, the harshness of the landscape and the greed that surrounded the times at the expense of the country’s old soul, the film captures something that will genuinely be ignored by many other productions to come out of the film-machine this year.
Ian D. Hall