The Lone Ranger – Barring any prolonged discussion about Johnny Depp reinvigorating Indian stereotypes in films (yes, we know your great-great grandmother was Apache or something) or the strange historical inaccuracies (railroads in Texas during 1869? Definitely not!), the Lone Ranger still manages to present one of the strangest blockbuster movies of recent memory. American critics hated it with a passion far too heated for such a low simmering movie, and the budget far exceeds anything that actually comes the viewer’s eyeballs. Honestly, it’s quirky enough in both style and pacing that, barring the heritage of big-budget Western bombs, it felt like no surprise to see The Lone Ranger’s ultimate failure.
But does this mean it’s a bad film? Not in my estimation. Rather, I see it as a different take on the action-adventure formula made famous by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio in the more recent Zorro and Pirates of the Caribbean series, They write exciting films with double crosses, weird tonal shifts from comedy to drama and then back again, and a seeming billion subplots that sometimes go somewhere (but often feel self-indulgent). That they fit this all within two and half hours will either exhaust your audience (as proved with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and our titular subject) or function as both crowd-pleaser and intelligent plotline. In sum, they make “acquired taste” films that actually improve over several viewings.