Verbinski and his cast seem to have aimed for the serial cowboy adventure of old and to a large extent they managed this with the Lone Ranger.

Johnny Depp’s Tonto is an enjoyably eccentric hero and protagonist for the majority of the film and he’s quirky, Jack Sparrow-show only starts to grate towards the end of the film but it does grate. Overall the film does pay its dues to the Western films and TV shows with clearly defined white hats against black hats which in this style of film is no bad thing.

Armie Hammer makes a good, if somewhat bumbling, hero to root for and you do care that he succeeds so on this front the film hit the target. Alongside him villains Tom Wilkinson and William Fichtner play the two villain types straight out of the ‘Big Book of Baddies’. Wilkinson being the more traditional Lone Ranger black hat as a slimetastic businessman trying to buy up the West and make himself rich beyond dreams. His muscle is the deranged Fichtner and herein lies the problem with the film throughout. Fichtner’s character, Cavendish, is a straight-up murdering, heartless, psychopath whose appearance and behaviour seems to be from a different, darker, more serious film.

This is the big problem for me with the whole film. We seem to have comic, fun, cowboy romp, yet somehow it makes a huge misstep with the wholesale slaughter of Comanche’s by machine-gun fire and a main character having his heart carved out while he is alive. Hardly light and fun.

The set pieces and action scenes were exciting and rip-roaring if a little over-the-top but if the film was kept in this style throughout that would have been fine. The acting throughout was good, even with Johnny Depp playing his usual character. I enjoyed being swept along by the story except for the general slaughter and horrible deaths being mixed in with the wacky light-hearted humour.
There was enough here to make a reasonable franchise, a popular set of recognisable fun and flawed heroes, good intriguing supporting cast but the tone of the film was uneven and seriously made huge mistakes in some places.

A great opportunity to reinvent a once popular and interesting hero missed due to a few basic tonal errors. Booo.