Disney’s “The Lone Ranger” was released and received a lot of very bad reviews from critics and only 30% of critics liked it on rotten tomatoes. This made it unpopular and pushed cinemas to stop showing it or put it on few times in small screen studios. Last night I ventured out across the Wild West to a Vue Cinema to see the Lone Ranger, in a 40 seat, small screen studio.
The film started off very well, with a young boy dressed like the lone ranger in a 1930’s carnival in San Francisco. The boy ventures into the tent and views a wild west bull, a bunch of cowboy mannequins and then stands in front of a wax figure of an old Indian. The boy watches him carefully and then sees his eyes blink. The boy jumps back and the man introduces himself as Tonto. The boy wonders how he came to be a mannequin in a travelling circus and so Tonto starts telling him the story from the past.
Tonto tells of a time when he and his masked partner robbed a bank. The boy then questions why he did that, as the lone ranger was meant to be a force of justice. Tonto then goes back much further and the story begins…
I enjoyed The Lone Ranger but it wasn’t the best film I have seen recently in the cinema. The trailer was very well done and made you eager to see it, fooling you that it is a straight out action movie, but frankly it’s not. I’m not saying for one minute that The Lone Ranger doesn’t have great action scenes, but it fails to fulfil its promise. Firstly I’ll look at the good points of The Lone Ranger
- It has some thrilling action scenes
- There is some great comedy
- It has some suprising twists
And here are the not so great points of The Lone Ranger.
- It doesn’t hold the suspense you need for an action film
- It doesn’t fulfil enough comedy and laughs to hold the audience
- It has some silly things like a horse ending up in a tree of its own accord standing on a branch which the film could of done without
That’s where it faults, I would find it hard to categorize this film if I had to as it doesn’t fulfil action or comedy standards. If there were such a thing as an action O’meter or a comedy O’meter it wouldn’t have reached a high enough level to achieve its category of “action” or “comedy”.
Overall I would say this film is not worth seeing in the cinema or really on DVD unless you are a big fan of Johnny Depp or The Wild West.
I rate this film 2.75/5 stars.
Noam Solomons-Wise 