Kritiken

Americans rejected the notion of watching its storied past as essentially violent. The Lone Ranger attempted to have it both ways. It's a rollicking adventure film with a spring in its step, cut with a disturbing, angry lesson in alternative history. The narrative we choose to ignore.

The dovetailed histories of film and the 19th-century western expansion provides plenty of grist for Verbinski's mill, but he's an able enough builder to erect something resembling a grand design of his own. If the movie remains deeply imperfect, it's only because the ingenuity of its moment-by-moment, sequence-by-sequence construction far outpaces the uncertainty of its lumpy script...

...The film makes history a game, a play-area for myth. That's a lot to tackle in a popcorn blockbuster... Where Django Unchained is bluntly righteous, and moral, The Lone Ranger is somehow both oblique and open, allowing characters to change their minds as their understanding of the world's machinations become complicated by a "reality" forever out of balance and frankly up for debate.

The Lone Ranger is every bit as big, daft and clumsy as you'd expect. It's predictably bloated at 149 minutes and there's an uneven tension between the cartoony Disney blockbusting and the absurdo realism. But the whole thing is top-and-tailed by two absolutely spectacular runaway train sequences which appear to reference more than one Buster Keaton romp.

The Lone Ranger clearly intends to inherit the revisionist Western mantle, with the massacres and the psychosis and the politicalized rage, while keeping the laughs and slapstick action. Typical of Verbinski's more-is-more attitude, he doesn't seem to see the problem with putting wildly clashing elements together and stirring vigorously.

The film has an antic spirit and lots of pleasurable detail – but it's finally too baggy, too exhausting, and (like Man of Steel, another recent behemoth) about an hour too long... By the standards of summer blockbusters, Lone Ranger has both edge and personality. But how much can a person take?

The Lone Ranger, like [Verbinski's] last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences. The Lone Ranger began as a frivolous radio adventure serial for boys in the 1930s, and the idea of adapting it for the present does not make it any less frivolous. The more elements Verbinski and company add, the more fun gets taken away.

For all its miscalculations, this is a personal picture, violent and sweet, clever and goofy. It's as obsessive and overbearing as Steven Spielberg's "1941"—and, I'll bet, as likely to be re-evaluated twenty years from now, and described as "misunderstood."

Making the Lone Ranger's right-hand the narrator was clearly a move that was meant to right the wrongs of the past, finally giving the sidekick the wheel. Unfortunately, it's only a platitude. Lacking any character depth (though he's at least given a back story), Depp's Tonto may not be overtly racist, but it's an uncomfortably reductive portrayal of "red face.

The Western is an inherently political genre because it renders as physical action the functions of government that, in modernity, are often bureaucratic and abstract. But that's exactly where the highly constructed conceptualism of "The Lone Ranger" disappoints: it renders the physical abstract. Despite the elaborate and often clever gag-like action stunts... and the occasionally grotesque violence, the movie seems not to be there at all, replaced throughout by the idea of the movie.

No 149-minute Western should feature more close-ups of timepieces than of horses or human beings. It should not spend a reported $250 million to feature a plot in which a railroad tycoon looks to bilk magnates of their millions. It should not see the fraught historical relationship between Native Americans and white people as the perfect occasion to test a new theme-park ride.

If there's a more bizarre major studio release than "The Lone Ranger" this year, I'm not sure I want to see it. Not that I mean to insult this movie, which I suspect may actually be a genuine act of subversion on the part of its makers and is thus strangely ... admirable. Still. The damn thing is pretty exhausting.