The Lone Ranger

Great summer entertainment. It’s just a shame about those two unentertaining hours that precede it. Gore Verbinski is capable of building a more or less clear, gag-laden action scene, but he is incapable of combining the individual attractions into a sensibly cohesive whole. The entire film oscillates between paying tribute to and ridiculing classic westerns (from Ford to Leone, from whom the screenwriters stole the most), which leads to jarringly sharp transitions between affected heroism and infantile humour along the lines of Mel Brooks’s weaker parodies. The film doesn’t manage to find a balance between sentimental and grotesque; no idea taken from any distant genre is too bizarre (the eating of a heart, bloodthirsty rabbits) and no joke is too cheap (horse dung). The stringing together of various western motifs, which are derived either from individual films or from the conventions of the genre in general, lacks any higher order and comes across as being rather random. The film thus seems tediously long, or rather seems like it’s long only for the sake of being long. Because it lacks a coherent narrative that constantly refers to something, The Lone Ranger fails to draw the viewer into the story. It also isn’t helped by the fact that it follows a four-act structure with a gradual piling-up of obstacles to overcome and goals to be achieved (hunt down Butch; capture Butch and save Rebecca; catch Butch, save Rebecca and bring the other villain to justice). The protagonists do not undergo any character transformation, the motifs are either repeated so frequently that they lose their comedic value (e.g. the running gags with the mask and feeding a bird), or they serve solely for momentary amusement, and you don’t have to have the tracking skills of an Indian scout to figure out far in advance what “twist” is coming at any time in the course of the film. Though the climax is excellent in and of itself and recalls Buster Keaton’s best moments, it snuffs out all of the storylines with pointless action that doesn’t resolve anything and that could have been placed anywhere else in the film (ideally right at the beginning, so you could leave the cinema feeling that you had already seen the best part of the film). The film establishes an alibi for its excessive ambition and capricious disjointedness by constructing a flimsy retrospective narrative framework (whose benefit to the narrative is best expressed with the word “gimmick”). The type of listener (a young boy fascinated by western legends) and the narrator’s inability to sustain an idea correspond to the film’s flitting between humility and belittling of the genre. Due to the infrequent and unoriginal inclusion of metatextual remarks, I don’t believe this was a premeditated plan, but rather a desperate attempt to retroactively build a cohesive a story that didn’t really hold together. Tonto’s cleaning up among the other fairground attractions at least captures how the once-revered western genre is perceived today. The western legend has become a relic recalling the Wild West era. The fairground-attraction nature of Tonto’s new role logically requires that what he had experienced be reduced to the most distinctive features of the given period. Tonto’s story can thus be understood as a "best of" compilation of what makes a western a western, but that was previously covered by the story of Little Big Man, which had a much better screenplay and a protagonist who underwent much greater development, and whose narrative was motivated by the revision of certain western myths. Conversely, The Lone Ranger is a regressive (the woman as a beautiful, passive and defenceless object) and incoherent exhibition of what some people in Hollywood think of when they hear the word “western”. 55% (04/07/2013) (less) (more)