When Hollywood starts to scrape the bottom of the barrel for action flicks, they go back to the days of the early TV. With that we get "The Green Hornet," which was a terrible movie. Logically then, if Hollywood were to go even farther back, to radio days, to make their big budget action blockbuster, the movie would be even worse.
Thankfully, with Disney and Gore Verbinsky at the helm, we get "The Lone Ranger."
Lawyer John Reid goes home to Texas to be a DA. His brother is the local Texas Ranger and deputizes him to hunt down a missing outlaw. On the way to doing that however, him and his posse get ambushed and slaughtered. Enter Captain Jack Sparrow, I mean Tonto, and along with a somewhat-sacred-to-Indians horse, revives John...apparently we're going with "Princess Bride" logic about the stages of dead. With new life and a new partner, John now seeks justice/revenge for his brother.
With that incredibly wordy synopsis out of the way, let's just say what this movie really is:
"Pirates of the Caribbean" set in the Ol' West.
There are so many parallels and similarities between the two films, that really it's not a far stretch to call them essentially the same movie. A kooky dude from another culture ropes an everyday unlucky dude into an adventure involving guns, explosions, conspiracies, unrequited old loves, weird-acting animals, cranky prostitutes, tragic loss of family, and big epic showdowns aboard moving vessels.
But is this necessarily a bad thing? Nope!
"Pirates of the Caribbean," no matter how convoluted, unnecessarily oddball, and fraught with love triangle nonsense it may be, is still a darn good film series, with the first "Curse of the Black Pearl" being one of my personal favorites. I can say with much confidence that if you liked any of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, you will like this revisioning of the "Lone Ranger." By no means is it a perfect movie though, with weirdness from Johnny Depp's character likely to raise some eyebrows, and the Lone Ranger himself being an incompetent buffoon not unlike Seth Rogan's character from "The Green Hornet" for about 2/3 of the movie. However, the visuals, the action, the setting, and hitting all the right mythology gags make this a grand big budget action flick.
And even though I mentioned that they hit all the right "Lone Ranger" references, I am slightly saddened that this was never brought up:
I wish I had more of a fun time, but I just didn’t. Almost way too boring for me really. Good review V.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think the climax really made up for the first half of slog and lameness from our main character. But unlike "Green Hornet" both our protagonists become super cool once the William Tell Overture kicks in.
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