Gore Verbinski opens and closes with runaway trains as well staged as anything in his Pirates films, and spends the two hours between them unsure whether his hero is a joke. Worth an evening for the finale; bring patience.
Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer and the writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio made the first Pirates of the Caribbean out of a theme-park ride, so a western made out of a radio serial should surprise nobody. With Justin Haythe they have given The Lone Ranger a framing idea: the story is told by an ancient Tonto to a boy at a fairground, which means the masked man is remembered as a fool and the sidekick as the one who understood. It is a decent idea inside a 149-minute film with two marvellous train sequences at either end and, in the middle, a picture that cannot decide what it thinks of its own hero.
John Reid (Armie Hammer) and Tonto (Johnny Depp) are shackled together on the roof of a moving carriage while Butch Cavendish’s gang rips up the rails ahead, and Bojan Bazelli keeps the camera far enough back that we can always see how little track is left. James Haygood and Craig Wood cut it long, on the movement rather than the impact, so a man falling from a roof reads as a man falling and not as a flurry. The engine goes through the end of the line and keeps going. We sat up.
Hammer plays Reid as an upright prig who does not carry a gun and is slightly proud of it, and the script never lets him become anything else. Depp’s Tonto is a face of cracked white paint under a dead crow he keeps trying to feed, and his timing is silent-comedy timing: the long stare, the small adjustment. Some of it is funny. But the film wants him to be both the clown and its conscience, and a white actor in paint playing a Comanche as an eccentric sits badly, however much Penny Rose’s outcast costume protests. Every sad piece of backstory feels like an apology for the previous joke.
The middle hour and a half argues with itself. William Fichtner’s Cavendish is a proper villain, with a ruined mouth and dead eyes, and he does something to a dying man in the first act that we were startled to find in a 12A. Then there is a horse standing in a tree. Then the cavalry, under Barry Pepper’s Fuller, opens up on a Comanche charge with a Gatling gun and the film treats it as a massacre, which it is, and cuts to Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Harrington and her ivory leg. Tom Wilkinson’s Cole delivers speeches about progress in a voice like a closing door. We were bored, then unsettled, then bored again, and none of it led anywhere.
The craft is expensive and mostly good. Jess Gonchor’s Colby is a town of raw planks and one brick building with the railway running straight through it, and the half-finished trestle bridge is a set that earns its screen time. Bazelli shoots the desert wide and flat, in the compositions John Ford made the shape of the genre, and Hans Zimmer holds the one tune everybody is waiting for until the last possible minute.
When the William Tell Overture does arrive, over two trains on parallel tracks and a white horse galloping along a carriage roof, it works on us completely. We grinned, we sat forward, and we were slightly ashamed of ourselves after the previous hour. Verbinski stages the whole finale as a single piece of clockwork, with people changing trains, a ladder swung between carriages and a bridge coming apart under the lot, and he never lets us lose track of who is where. It is the best sustained action he has directed.
His own Rango, from 2011, was a comedy western with the same landscapes, a fraction of the sprawl and a clear view of its hero. This one seems embarrassed by him and then asks us to cheer. Most critics landed near where we have, half won over and half exhausted.
See the first twenty minutes and the last twenty in the largest room you can find. What you do with the two hours between them is your own business, and the film will not notice.
