The Lone Ranger - Review

Where do I begin? When the trailer for this film came out, I was extremely pumped. It came from the team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and looked like a badass western film. What sad is that this film has all the tools for success. It takes place in the lawless frontier, it has a great cast and some of the action set-pieces, especially the climax, is so well choreographed and exciting. The problem lies in the story and characters. With a western like this, especially a Disney one, you don't need this super complex story that is over 2 hours long for it to be interesting Although, if you do want to have a super epic complex story, you better have some dynamic characters... this film does not. I love Armie Hammer and I love Johnny Depp, but they have little to no chemistry together and their comedic chops are extremely lacking. With the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann all worked well together because they all had enough screen-time to build character and empathy with the audience. Here, I cannot even tell "the girl's" name in this film. Hell, I couldn't tell you anybody's name other than Tonto. That is a really bad sign that you don't even remember the main character's name. He is supposed to be this badass "Lone Ranger" but instead, we get a wimp who doesn't believe in shooting guns... Okay, who was the studio executive to let that one slide? Overall, it's watchable. For anything, admire it for its locations, production design and action set-pieces. Unfortunately, that is not enough to hold most people over. People want to like and remember the characters in their movies and we didn't get any here.