Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as The Lone Ranger (Peter Mountain)
‘Those two have trouble staying dead,’’ a bad guy says at one point of the title character in “The Lone Ranger,’’ played by Armie Hammer, and the now-main character, Tonto, portrayed by Johnny Depp.
The sad truth is these durable 80-year-old characters, who peaked with a 1950s TV series, never even come to life in this bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.
There’s the Lone Ranger being dragged through equine manure. There’s a scene where our hero literally tries to beat a dead horse. And then you have a train plunging off a dynamited bridge into a ravine at the climax, which feels like four hours after the movie itself has gone off the rails.
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Imagine “Heaven’s Gate’’ as a family film with half the laughs and none of the visual grandeur. John Ford would have director Gore Verbinski strung up if he could see the atrocities he’s committed in Ford’s beloved Monument Valley.
The director of “The Searchers’’ would be appalled at a committee-written script that simultaneously tries to send up the western genre while trying to play it straight — and throws in a couple of PG-13-rated Indian massacres strictly as devices to move along a convoluted plot that stubbornly refuses to cohere.
Depp certainly tries every schtick in the book as Tonto, first introduced in “Little Big Man’’ makeup as a Wild West Show attraction in 1933 San Francisco, relates the Lone Ranger’s lumbering origin story from way back in 1869.
Hammer’s John Reid, newly arrived as territorial prosecutor, is deputized as a Texas Ranger by his older brother (James Badge Dale) to hunt down outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichter, a good actor but no comedian), who ends up slaughtering all of the search party — and cutting out the brother’s heart.
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John, presumed dead by Butch, is found and revived by Tonto, an aphorism machine who is always saying things like “justice is what a man must take for himself.’’
Tonto — who first meets the future Lone Ranger on a train where he’s being held captive with Butch — has his own reason to want vengeance against Butch, though it’s not really worth the hour’s wait to find out the particulars.
Depp attempts to invest Tonto with some sort of crackpot dignity, but he saves John so often, he comes dangerously close to a Native American version of what Spike Lee calls the Magical Negro: a character whose raison d’etre is helping a white character, even if he keeps calling him stupid.
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At least Depp gets a few laughs, but vastly fewer than in the far livelier “Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ which Verbinski also directed. (The two also collaborated on the animated western spoof “Rango,’’ which has more wit in any random five minutes than in the whole of “The Lone Ranger.’’)
Poor Hammer plays John Reid mostly as a masked bumbler up until the very end, when he turns into the Lone Ranger as Rossini’s “William Tell Overture’’ swells on the soundtrack. It’s too little, too late.
“The Lone Ranger’’ pours on untold Disney millions in special effects and stunt work in what blurs into one long visual non sequitur that tries to bludgeon you into submission. By the time the movie careened into its third hour, I was begging for mercy.
“How could this be worse?’’ John Reid asks at one point, a sentiment that will no doubt be shared by millions of moviegoers around the world. Well, I guess it could have been in 3-D and run half an hour longer, but that would have violated the Geneva Convention.