Does the black guy live? Movie Reviews This week... LONE RANGER

Lone Ranger movie review

First, I need to say a few things. The Lone Ranger and I have a little history. I've always been a fan of the Lone Ranger, whether it was the cartoons or the 80's movie Legend of the Lone Ranger. There were a few reasons why I wanted to see this film. Sorry, gotta take you through some back story...
I grew up in Flint,Michigan and as a young black boy unfortunately Mother/Father homes weren't the norm. Well I was blessed with one (not saying if you had a single parent home you weren't blessed). And as a family, my father, mother, sister, and I would go to the movies. I remember going to see The Legend of the Lone Ranger as a family. It is one of my fondest memories. Today, parents are so busy either working, or not caring, that family activities seem to be a rarity. Now as an adult, I treasure those times when my family did things together.

My daughters are too young to sit through a movie, but I plan to do things with them when they're older.

Plus, I'm a huge Johnny Depp fan.

Does the black guy live?
SPOILER ALERT!

Yes and no.

Its probably not a coincidence that the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet were created by the same guy(s). Because both movies had a similar premise, put a lot of emphasis on their mode of transportation (Silver the horse and the car Black Beauty respectively), both movies bombed at the box office and unfortunately for me...I liked both movies. Yes, I cry a little on the inside when I think about it.

Already going in, I figured that this was going to be the Tonto show. Johnny Depp is the headliner and he's playing Tonto. Still my love for the basic concept of the Lone Ranger and Depp let me look past it. Just as in the Green Hornet movie with Seth Rogen, in The Lone Ranger, we see the sidekick doing most of the heavy lifting. While our title character bumbles through things. I honestly like that to a certain extent. Still you can't have a headlining hero that bumbles through the whole movie. And for these 2 movies that was pretty much the case.

Let's swing our focus back to the Lone Ranger. I did love Tonto's character. This treatment of the Lone Ranger gave Tonto's character depth, something that I've never seen done. We see Tonto as a tragic hero who is an outcast due to a mistake that he made as a young brave. You could almost call the story the Lone Ranger and the Lone Brave. The story dabbled in Native American mysticism; calling the Lone Ranger a spirit walker, calling the bad guy of the story a Wendigo and needing a silver bullet to kill him. I really liked and appreciated the Wendigo turned out to be something that Tonto made up as a child to make sense of the mistake he made and the evil of men. Red as the one legged madam was awesome! She walked around with her artificial leg made of ivory that also was a shotgun. Red was too cool. The special effects were done well.
Now onto what I didn't like. Our Lone bumbling Ranger has multiple opportunities to take out the bad guy and doesn't because of his overactive moral compass. It takes him most of the movie to discover that fighting fair and the law isn't going to work, so he becomes an outlaw. This was fine, but it took most of the movie for him to find this out. I understand tis is the origin story, but we lose a lot of time waiting for John Reid to become the Lone Ranger. While I appreciated the fact that John Reid wanted to stop the "war" between Native Americans and the White man's army, I didn't like the futility of their fight or watching all of them getting mowed down by the gatling guns. But I do understand the argument that some might make that it was neccessary. Tonto saved the two white men who wold ultimately massacre his village. I'd like to think that it would take more than two white men to kill that many Native Americans, but the movie didn't go into how they did it, so it might have been implied that they got help. For all the time it took our hero to make his journey from laywer to outlaw, you'd think there would've been time for a training montage. I would've appreciated it.

The movie was campy, draw out, and in some parts badly written. And I loved it. Still while I loved it, I am not blind to the fact that it had a lot of issues and thus it was a box office disaster.

The after credit scene was a little funny, but didn't add anything!
C grade for Lone Ranger!