But I'm not sure whether the new version is less offensive than the original. This is definitely a post-political correctness version of the Indian sidekick. Johnny Depp plays him as a comic-tragic type, whose broken English becomes a kind of conscious brokenness. Tonto is right at the center of this anxious storytelling.
#THE LONE RANGER FULL MOVIE SERIES#
While the original television series Lone Ranger relied, almost to a fault, on the strength of its iconography, the new version is terrified of what meanings people will read into it. (Why, in the movies, are children always politely curious about the stories of random strangers?) The framing device - here as always - is the surest sign of storytellers in a panic. It begins in a flashforward to 1933 with Tonto in a traveling exhibit entitled "The Noble Savage in His Native Habitat." He walks around the wax scenery, having gnomic conversation with a cute, questioning kid dressed up as the Lone Ranger. The simplicity of the original show is in sharp contrast to the Bruckheimer version of today, which cannot seem to decide what kind of story it is. The structure of serialized television is all there: great theme music, a series of catchphrases ("Hi-Yo, Silver!"), and a twenty-two minute structure that could be repeated endlessly with pleasure. After the transition from radio, it was the first huge hit for ABC, and it ran for nearly the entire 1950s. The original television series The Lone Ranger was one of the shows that invented pop culture as we know it. It's the kind of artistic failure that makes you question not just the movie, and everyone involved in making it, but the entire culture that produced it. The decision to play Tonto falls into the latter category.
Depp is a courageous actor who takes big risks, which sometimes pay off magnificently and sometimes end in disaster. It has all the failings that a big blockbuster can have - convoluted overinvolved plots, cardboard characters, and bland action sequences - and it also has Johnny Depp as Tonto.
The Lone Ranger is a film that manages to be bad in many ordinary ways and, also, to be bad in a rather extraordinary way. It's still only midsummer, so it's not yet possible to state definitively that The Lone Ranger, released over the holiday weekend, is the worst film of 2013.
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