When Justice Must Wear a Mask

Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp in "The Lone Ranger"

By Dan Hagen

These filmmakers have the smarts to begin and end their story with the true Lone Ranger, who is some small boy in 1933 wearing a cowboy suit and a black domino mask.

That boy was, among others, my father, listening with rapt attention to thrilling adventures that wafted to him in his parents’ lonely farmhouse on the prairie.

In the movie, in a San Francisco carnival sideshow, the boy encounters an ancient Indian who calls himself Tonto (Johnny Depp), a “spirit warrior” with a seemingly dead crow on his head. Is the boy dreaming? W, as they say, TF?

Tonto tells the boy a strange story that does not seem to tally with the adventure program he has heard coming from Detroit on the radio, but finally will converge with it in all particulars. And that’s because the filmmakers are also smart enough to use every element of the Lone Ranger’s already perfect origin, but enhance each aspect of it logically for a 21^st century audience.

For example, the muted supernatural elements of this story account for things never explained before. How does the Lone Ranger shoot his silver bullets with such uncanny accuracy? Why are his bullets silver, anyway? Why isn’t he killed when he goes up against criminal gangs?

Tonto believes that John Reid (Armie Hammer), the single survivor of a Texas Ranger ambush, is a “spirit walker” who has crossed back from the other side and therefore cannot be slain in battle. Or is Tonto crazy, merely the permanently damaged and guilt-ridden survivor of a childhood tragedy? If it makes any difference, a great white horse he chats with agrees with Tonto.

Depp does for Tonto what he once did for pirates, giving the deadpan humor a stoic rather than a rum-soaked twist this time. And Hammer begins as someone who both is and is not the Lone Ranger, a ridiculously idealistic Eastern lawyer who loves his brother’s wife with silent nobility and who believes in civilization. He is about to learn that civilization, however, does not believe in him.

This action-comedy has some surprisingly dramatic moments, and some truly vile villains. When you require someone who can do rotten with subtle relish, you get Tom Wilkinson, of course, and the filmmakers were smart enough to do that. Wilkinson plays a kleptocapitalist who will teach Reid that the civilized principles he reveres are used as a mask to disguise a corrupt, predatory society, and that Reid himself will require a mask to set things right.

The movie’s ending is overlong, but that seems to be the case with every film this summer. We get a slow burn to the William Tell Overture, which provides us a proper crescendo. Unlike the people who made “Man of Steel,” these filmmakers had the smarts to use the right music.

And all the jests are finally in service of a relevant truth. In 1869, in 1933 or in 2013, when justice is outlawed, only outlaws will dispense justice.