YMMV / The Lone Ranger (2013)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Could the entire story that old Tonto is telling the boy simply be a lie or a deliberate exaggeration just for Tonto's own amusement?
• Awesome Music: Would you expect anything less from Hans Zimmer? The title theme and leitmotif, "Never Take Off the Mask", is especially cool: an eerie, atmospheric, and melancholy violin piece that feels tonally similar to the great Ennio Morricone scores of Westerns past without being an obvious ripoff.
  • And of course, you cannot have the Lone Ranger without The William Tell Overture.
• Complete Monster: The Big Bad and his Dragon:
  • Latham Cole is a sinister railroad tycoon and the brother to the vicious Butch Cavendish, and despite their mutual loathing, enables much of Cavendish's evil. Having massacred Tonto's people in the past, Cole seeks to build a future of wealth and status by having Butch's men slaughter settlements while dressed as Comanche to provoke a massacre of the natives. Cole orders the slaughter of the Comanche warriors, harvesting the silver from the rivers to build his empire, boasting that soon, nobody will know the Comanche existed.
  • Butch Cavendish himself shows why he is rumored to be a Wendigo when, after gunning down John Reid's brother Dan, Butch cuts out his heart and eats it. Butch uses fear to oppress any hint of rebellion and will kill at any hint of complaint. At one point, Butch even kills a laborer for nothing more than saying the entrance of a cave he wanted entry to was blocked. Butch conspires to start a war with, and wipe out, the Comanche people for the silver in the mines by leading attacks on innocent people in settlements, framing the Comanche. In the past, when the Comanche saved Butch's life, he repaid them by slaughtering them, earning Tonto's undying hatred.
• Creepy Awesome: Butch Cavendish. William Fichtner plays him as an absolute psycho, but it's so hammy and entertaining that many people named him one of the best characters in the movie.
• Ending Fatigue: In the words of critic Christopher Orr:
  Orr: Somewhere, around the hour-and-a-half mark, The Lone Ranger makes the fateful decision not to end. Worse, the movie keeps not-ending for another full hour.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Red, mainly for her ivory leg with a gun in it.
  • Butch Cavendish as well. Aside from his Creepy Awesome persona, William Fichtner plays him as so over-the-top loathsome and hateful that he's a blast to watch. Brad Jones from Midnight Screenings admitted that even though he hated the film, Cavendish was the best part about it.
• Ethnic Scrappy: Several critics have taken the stance that the "Tonto is crazy" explanation for his strange dress and manner is simply a way to try to excuse the numerous Hollywood stereotypes in the character's portrayal.
• Genius Bonus: Silver dealing with scorpions on John and Tonto's faces by eating them seems like an Ass Pull at first, but horses really are immune to several types of venoms, to the extent that horse hormones have been used to develop antivenins.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Butch is a depraved, twisted man who indulges in cannibalism, and at one point John has a nightmare of himself doing the same. Years later, Armie Hammer's career was destroyed when a private social media account attributed to him was leaked, revealing all kinds of unsavory details about his personal life, including open fantasies about cannibalism.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint against the film is just that it is rehashed Pirates of the Caribbean in the The Wild West. Tonto is Jack, The Lone Ranger is Will Turner, The Royal Navy replaced by the U.S. Cavalry, etc.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Some people went only to see Johnny Depp or the chase scene at the end.
  • Some people also watch the movie for Butch Cavendish due to his memorably dark scenes.
  • Everyone knows there's going to be an action climax with the William Tell Overture playing over it.
• Love to Hate: Butch Cavendish. See Creepy Awesome and Ensemble Dark Horse above for reasons why.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Butch crosses it when he guts Reid's brother Dan and eats his heart.
  • The cavalry captain has one. Where he is just with the bad guys because he realized too late he'd been tricked into committing war crimes against the Native Americans, trying to gun down a kid was just superfluous at best.
• Older Than They Think: This wasn't the first time Johnny Depp played a Native American character. He starred and directed (for the first time) a movie titled The Brave (based on a novel of the same name by Gregory McDonald), which is about a Native American man participating in a snuff film to secure his family's financial future (the premise oddly sounds familiar with another movie from Serbia). However, due to its negative reception at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Depp never released this movie in theaters in the U.S.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: More than any marketing campaign, the film was in the spotlight for its casting of white actor Johnny Depp as Tonto. This announcement was hit with a firestorm of criticism, with many noting that even the '50s TV show cast actual Native American actor Jay Silverheels to play Tonto, and The Legend of the Lone Ranger followed suit with its casting of Michael Horse (who mocked this film by releasing a picture of himself with a chicken on his head). Not helping matters was the fact that Tonto featured more heavily in the marketing than the Lone Ranger himself. Depp was given significant creative control about the character, and he has said he based the look of the character mainly on a single painting, "I am Crow" by Kirby Sattler. No Native American ever wore a dead bird on their head, and in the painting a crow is flying behind the head of the subject. Sattler himself is not a Native American, and openly says his paintings come from his imaginings and do not depict any specific native culture. With the whitewashed casting and open admissions of deliberate inaccuracy, it's not hard to see where the controversy came from.
• Questionable Casting: The casting of Johnny Depp as Tonto was compared to Redface in some circles as while Depp claimed to have Native American ancestry, no American Indian tribe was able to confirm his ancestry. Even aside from controversies surrounding Depp's heritage, his performance was seen as a pale imitation of his previous performance as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates movies.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The subplot with John being in love with his brother Dan's wife Rebecca and vice versa never really stood a chance of being remotely satisfying. Tonto proclaimed that he had a vision of John and Rebecca together and having a child together, which becomes extremely unpleasant because she already has a son with his brother Dan. That's just nine kinds of awkward right there.
• Signature Scene: The final chase sequence on the trains.
• So Okay, It's Average: Audiences who aren't offended by the portrayals of the characters say that it's not a terrible film and has a pretty decent story. Still, at best it's just a weekend rental.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A number of changes that were made to the characters have not gone without backlash, most notably the change of Reid from badass Texas Ranger to bumbling City Mouse lawyer who largely succeeds out of sheer luck, and the transition of Tonto from Magical Native American to "some lunatic who's dragging the Ranger along on his own quest for revenge" (which is really just going from one problem to another), and who treats the Ranger more as a thing to be tolerated than a partner worthy of respect.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
  • A common complaint against the film is just that it's simply Pirates of the Caribbean in the Wild West. Tonto is Jack, The Lone Ranger is Will Turner, The Royal Navy replaced by the U.S. Cavalry, etc.
  • The plot basics are surprisingly similar to that of RoboCop (1987) of all things. The hero is a noble law enforcement officer who's nearly slain by a notorious outlaw, is revived and ends up stronger than before, has a partner who helps him figure out who he should be going after, brings the outlaw in — only to discover that he was all along in cahoots with a Corrupt Corporate Executive who sets law enforcement/the army on the heroes.
  • In his Midnight Screenings video on the film, Brad Jones criticised the plot for essentially being Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the railway being the freeway and Tonto's tribe being the Toons.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Doing a Decon-Recon Switch with the Lone Ranger should work, having someone who many call the Ideal Hero fighting villains Darker and Edgier than he usually faced in the radio and TV series. It could even be a Sub-Genre vs Sub-Genre, with the hero from a lighter Traditional Western vs. villains from a darker Spaghetti Western. However, the plot focuses more on John's journey to become the Ranger than examining the sub-genres' clashing ideals and perspectives, leaving the film with an uneven tone and feeling off in places. As mentioned above, the movie follows a disturbingly similar plot arc to the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, straight down to the Lone Ranger playing the part of Will Turner and Tonto as Jack Sparrow.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: This is probably one of Disney's darker films, as the PG-13 is pushed pretty far in regards to the violence.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Tonto's look is inspired by a painting◊ by an artist named Kirby Sattler. It was evidently Johnny Depp's idea to model Tonto's wardrobe after the painting. What he didn't realize is that the bird in the painting was meant to be flying behind the man's head. Of course, this is a deliberate artistic choice; Tonto in this version is insane, and nobody, Comanche, white, or otherwise, tries to claim anything different.

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