"The Lone Ranger"

Wasn't sure what to make of the strange collapse of this movie in the marketplace, so rounded up Joe the Plumber and saw it for myself.

Now that I've seen it for myself, I'm still not sure what to make of it. Joe the Plumber pronounced the comedy in the movie to be "adequate".

Action-adventure movies since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) have focused on close-calls and basically-superhuman capabilities. "Raiders" was particularly uncomfortable to watch, since the antics are so many, and cumulatively so improbable, that the odds of survival are basically nil.  Unfortunately it's now become a Hollywood big-budget movie tradition: a bad tradition. When super-humanity is required to survive, loss of interest in survival follows immediately. The Lone Ranger buys right into that tradition. For example, the last scene in the trailer enclosed here shows Johnny Depp as Tonto, leaping down something like 30 feet from one moving train to another, and landing on a nice, hard, rocky bed of silver ore so pure that it is basically composed of metal. If you do that in real life, you are basically not getting out of bed the next day. Or the day after that.

Then there's the tendency to cram every event that ever happened in the 19th Century into one movie. Instead of telling one story well, every story is told. And yet, I'm sure to much frustration, Queen Victoria is not mentioned once in the entire movie. How could a movie purport to tell the entire story of the 19th Century without mentioning Queen Victoria even once?

Still, at the same time, the movie was very entertaining, in its high-octane way. Johnny Depp's portrayal of Tonto owes much to Dustin Hoffmann's portrayal of Sitting Bull in Little Big Man (1970). Some people hate the artifice of Tonto appearing in the Old West museum, but I thought it was an excellent choice. We tell much of our past through museums, and they have more influence than people are even aware!  So, both very good and very bad, in an easy-to-forget combination!

I was disappointed the way locations were mix-mastered the way Hollywood likes to do. (Please, Texas does not look anything like Monument Valley, and Promontory Point isn't there either.) I was surprised how little of New Mexico actually appears in the movie, given the big splash it made there over the last year, but that's how it goes. I was intrigued by the locations they chose (I thought the Lone Pine, CA, location was particularly-effective): 

Creede, Colorado, USA
Albuquerque Studios - 5650 University Boulevard SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Monument Valley, Utah, USA
Monument Valley, Arizona, USA
Moab, Utah, USA
Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Chinle, Arizona, USA
Sunland, Los Angeles, California, USA
Hurley, New Mexico, USA
Angel Fire, New Mexico, USA (exterior scenes)
Lone Pine, California, USA (Tonto flash back)
Durango, Colorado, USA (train scenes)
Abiquiu, New Mexico, USA
Shiprock, New Mexico, USA
Alamosa, Colorado, USA
Puerco Valley, New Mexico, USA
Texas, USA

And what of the critics and their condemnations? Well, mostly well-deserved. So next time you try to cram the entire 19th-Century into a movie, you'd better mention Queen Victoria! And Napoleon! And Stanley and Livingstone! And the Crimean War!  And whaling!  None of which were mentioned, even once!:

This will now go down as a huge, massive, hilarious, unthinkable, crazy, job-killing blunder. The people who had the good sense to initially halt production should've stuck to their guns.

...Remember how the comedy Back to the Future: Part III paid homage to the West by exaggerating it in a semi-funny way? The Lone Ranger makes Back to the Future: Part III seem authentic in comparison.

How bad is it? The framing device for this movie has a very old Tonto telling some kid dressed as the Lone Ranger the story of how he met the masked man and their travels together. Tonto, looking like anything but a human being in tragic old-age makeup, is making a living posing as a Native American in a museum exhibit, right next to a grizzly bear.

...Everything in this movie is taken too far, from the dirt makeup to the crazy beards and chops to the caricature accents. Even the sound of a kid eating a peanut is turned up to an extent that becomes gut-churning and abrasive.

...Well, I get even more annoyed by PG-13 movies marketed to kids and families that contain the kind of violence on display in this crap. Heart-eating, horse-trampling, multiple gunshots, stabbings and the threat of sticking a duck's foot up somebody's ass should not be on the viewing agenda for the entire family.