One of the many problems The Lone Ranger faces is that it doesn’t feel modern. The Wild West that audiences have begun to again embrace with films like True Grit and Django Unchained thrive not because of their niche western setting but because of their steadily unique voice. In a genre where everything has been done before, they divided and conquered simply by doing something audiences haven’t seen before.

In The Lone Ranger, everything feels retread, tired, and ready to boot. As a winking tribute of sorts, it works to an extent, but tonally it’s stretched like an old rubber band ready to snap. The souring riff on the noble savage, played with tone-deaf readiness by Hollywood’s favorite eccentric, Johnny Depp, is off-putting, head-scratching, mildly offensive and entirely dated. The kitschy elements of the 1930s icon could have been celebrated and preserved, even in light of a modernized overhaul, but instead director Gore Verbinski and go-to cohort Johnny Depp have gone for broke and come up with bags of sand. 

On a visual level, The Lone Ranger looks pretty good but it is essentially just more of the same from the House of Mouse. Instead of the seascape cinematography, Bojan Bazelli‘s Great Plains and vast plateaus give a nice backdrop to the old west and paint a vision of the unbound expansiveness that characterized not only the landscapes but the people as well. However, his scenic vistas are often spoiled with inorganic CGI. A scene attempting to induce wonder, where a group of train passengers are privy to a stampeding herd of buffalo, looks as fake and poorly executed as the CG monkeys in Jumanji. It’s one thing to make a computer generated Kraken that only looks half believable but we’ve all seen buffalo before and they don’t look like that. It’s missteps like these that take us right out of the moment and exact attention on the anecdotal mildew eating away at the scenes.

After Jack White backed out from his anticipated rendition on an original score here, maestro Hans Zimmer steps in to do his own little ditty on old timey westerns that is largely out of his comfort zone. Particularly in the opening act, his musical choices seem strangely dour and simple in uncalled for places but a late stage rendition of the Gioachino Rossini old time classic “William Tell Overture” gives the finale a sense of unrestrained joy largely lacking throughout.

As a sandblasted counterpart to Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lone Ranger capitalizes on the same whimsical sense of adventure that characterized that blockbuster hit. While Verbinski’s gilded and sterile touch is noticeable throughout, missing is the sense of wonder and gleeful spectacle that made the original Pirates film such an unexpected hit.

Gone are the pirate ships swirling at sea and the over-the-top mannerisms of Captain Jack Sparrow and in their place are trains swirling on their tracks and the over-the-top mannerisms of Tonto. Instead of a drunken pirate slurring through his lines whilst whimsically walking the plank, Depp is sporting an antiquated dialect hardly short of full-blown racism and yet he preserves his signature teeter-totter shambling and the kooky gestures that he thinks serve as ample substitutes for character development in his recent career.

Depp’s Tonto may be a passive attempt at a revisionist facelift but the update isn’t working. Firstly and lastly, it is simply impossible to get past the fact that Depp is a white man (a well-known white man at that) playing dress-up as a Native American and masquerading as if his work here is earnest. Even his baseless makeup job is a caricature of savagery and otherness and in one fell swoop alienates his character’s underlying humanity while hammering in a false cultural cornerstone. Even his name Tonto translates to “stupid person” in Spanish.

The performance and costumery, almost helplessly seeping from Depp is disingenuous to the point of being a modern-day equivalent of black face. The trouble is you can almost tell that Depp’s heart is only half in this and he seems to be questioning the principle of his performance in the midst of it. Whoever put their stamp of approval on letting Depp play the noble savage (and yes, he is actually referred to as the noble savage) must have known they were playing with fire. Distasteful farce though it may be, this fire burns.

Armie Hammer, on the other side of the equation, seems to embrace the tongue-and-cheekiness with open arms and presents a lone ranger who is more of a shrieking Brendan Fraser-type than a hard-boiled hero. He’s a protagonist of circumstance whose biggest battle is escaping his own stilted notions of lawful sentencing in a land dictated by power-hungry manipulation and quick-draw justice. There is a fundamental disconnect between Hammer and Depp and their distinct acting sensibilities that adds up to a vacuous lack of synergy between these two leading men.

Hammer vies with a satirical riff on the dated concepts of wild west heroism, largely breaking expectations of the hardened western hero. His great asset is uncoordinated serendipity and he has an ethical aversion to firearms even though he is constantly in need of them. He’s gimmicky to be sure but Hammer’s self-awareness makes the experience far more pleasurable than Depp’s straight-laced quirk and Tim Burton-trained anti-spontaneity. As a man who refuses to ever watch his own work, it must be difficult for Depp to tell that the jig is up but someone needs to clue him in that the drug-addled kook he’s been playing for years must be put down Old Yeller style.

Like the characters meant to be working with each other, the film itself is fundamentally disjointed. It often feels like a piecemeal collective of set pieces strapped together with circumstantial artifices that only serve to bring our heroes into their impending action sequences. No wonder that no less than six screenwriters are responsible for this behemoth mess. Five must have been commissioned to write an action sequence each and the last must have been responsible for gluing this Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The true shame is that even with so much talent involved and a massive money-belt, the watered down result is hardly minor enjoyment even in light of some padded but fun moments. There are simply too many cooks in the kitchen and any enjoyable escapism is too little, too late. There are just too many instances of the unforgivable, mainly with Johnny Depp’s Tonto and the cringe-worthy narrative egg that encases the story, in which Tonto recounts the tale to a young boy at the fair, to give this one a pass. The Jerry Bruckheimer age of disposable Disney cinema has again balked on its chance for transcendence and has instead delivered derivation at its most sanitary.

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