The Lone Ranger Movie Review

In a time where there are very few new ideas in the movie business, the reinvention of a classic has become a genre unto itself.  Some have been decent, some have been horrible, but they all require you to bring something new to the table if you want a winner.  Case in point, Footloose.   The remake had most of the same scenes and even a ton of the exact same dialogue as the original, which made it nothing more than an over-budget copy that didn't translate well to the year 2011.  I have seen the original, probably 50 times, and I always leave it with the notion that "I have just got to dance".   I felt no such thing from the remake.  The horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween moved these cult classics into a truly horrific realm.  The makers brought new imagery to these  "classics" that would make Satan weep.  Unfortunately, what made these re-makes a success also ate a small piece of my soul.  They made darkness a whole lot darker.  Even reworks of children's movies like Alice in Wonderland bring something new with a mixture of eye candy and the perfect combination of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter.  It was great.  When you have that cast, you can almost forget the story and you will have a block buster...or so I thought. 

Enter "The Lone Ranger".  Even Helena and Johnny couldn't breathe life into this snore fest.  Besides a huge cast, they really brought nothing new to this old, old, really old "hero".  (Just so you don't get the wrong idea that I am a western bigot, Young Guns is in my top 10 movies of all time.)  I took my 8 year old and 13 year old to this and they both literally fell asleep for over 60% of the movie (Side note - I only took my kids to this after checking the content advisory, of course.  I follow the standard grandma rules, swearing is bad, sex is worse, violence...no problem.  The fact that my wife was out of town had nothing to do with my movie choice. )  Johnny does what he does playing the 50/50 mixture of insanity and inebriation which generally works well.  In this case, it comes off a little like black-face actors from the early days though.  "Red man like fire water."  The Ranger himself was supposed to start of weak, I guess, and slowly grow a pair over the course of the movie.  Sorry, he was a fancy lad the whole way through.  Helena is fun to watch, but I think the movie would have been a much better success if there wasn't a ranger in it at all.  Just Johnny and Helena against the world, they could call it Sweeny Todd 2.

They did make the bad guy pretty bad for a Disney movie and the violence was more than I expected from the advertisements.  Disembowelment and Disney generally don't go together, so the eating of human heart fresh from the chest cavity was way more than my money's worth.  Needless to say, I don't think a new Lone Ranger Ride will be popping up and Disneyland any time soon. 

I've read some other reviews, so bashing this further is likely just white noise, but I will speak a little to the score.  I realize you have to have the William Tell Overture somewhere in the movie, because it is The Lone Ranger.  That being said, it didn't fit at all with the feel of the movie and was very distracting during the final action sequences.  It also seemed way too loud and way too long to be appropriate and, in my opinion, ruined the end of the movie.

I don't blame the actors for this one.  It just didn't work, when it really should have.  Save your money and go to Despicable Me 2, whatever your age, you will enjoy it 100X more.