The Lone Ranger: Not As Bad As I Expected But Still Not Good

The Lone Ranger fell into a weird situation this past year.

It suffered from an exhausted audience not wanting to see Johnny Depp bring up another franchise, much less one where for some reason he would be playing a Native American. The whole time it managed to breed this sense of "I've seen this before in the last Pirates of the Caribbean," and so forth. But if I'm being truly honest about the product that made it to screen, I'd have to say it wasn't nearly as bad as water cooler chatter made it out to be. It wasn't exactly good either... Simply put, The Lone Ranger was a mediocre attempt at a franchise run by a company that thought it could get away with literally anything after successes with a truly awful Alice in Wonderland concept and an ever diminishing in quality Pirates franchise. Essentially it was doomed from the start despite any steps anybody made to right the ship.

Recognize, of course, that this was in no way shape or form actually a "Lone Ranger" movie. The insane scope of the film felt at all times unnecessary. It ran too long, the action was bizarre and yet we'd seen it before, there were a few solid jokes, but they were surrounded by so many bad ones that it became hard at a point to tell the difference. Realistically, Disney could have attempted a much simpler film and bought themselves more artistic credit with this property.

That being said, Armie Hammer was actually quite good in the titular role.

So why am I writing about this film now half a year after its release? Well it's up for an Oscar... for Makeup and Hairstyling. And it may just deserve the gold for this individual category. Isn't it funny how one group in a bad film can still shine through? When we got the scenes with elder Depp, I was impressed by the aging techniques used.

And when he was his usual age, the war paint he kept on all movie long seemed to change in ways that made perfect sense given the other insanity that was going on on screen.

In short, this mediocre failure of a film may still come home with some gold come March 2nd.