The short version of this review is this:
The Lone Ranger made a terrible western because it was too smart, too socially-conscious, and too well-done a movie to be a western, and you should see it on that basis.
The longer version is as follows:
It's no secret that the western genre is dying a slow and painful death. The few recent successes which have been wrought by stories with elements of westerns in them inadvertently became indicators of how irrelevant the western genre has become, because they were successful largely been a result of the other elements they used: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. used science-fiction and steam-punk elements to build its cult following; There Will Be Blood and Deadwood were American Gothic stories about the barbarity upon which both capitalism and American culture are founded; Django Unchained intentionally tore the western genre apart by highlighting the racism upon which typical western locales built their culture and economy, and was billed by its director as a "southern" to put distance between it and the genre which it unflinchingly criticises; and when Joss Whedon wanted to make a western, he went to the length of setting it in space* so that someone would watch…
… and in doing so, implicitly conceded that sending the entire genre on a one-way trip to another solar system would improve its standing with most viewers.
This lack on interest appears to be wrought by the genre's lack of resonance with modern audiences. Westerns aren't easy for modern people to relate to — they use simple language, gloss over the genocide/enslavement of entire ethnic groups, wax nostalgic about an era in which widespread illiteracy and a paucity of indoor plumbing was the order of the day, and glorify guns. None of those attributes are exactly selling points in this era — everyone in North America can read today, racial tensions are softened somewhat by official multiculturalism in Canada and a growing demographic of multi-racial households in the U.S.A. (making up 15% of the population at last estimate!) today, smartphones and toilets are now ubiquitous, and private gun ownership has become a useless liability rather than a necessary asset. With the changes in North America's culture during the last several decades making the western genre obsolete from most people's perspectives, it doesn't attract viewers on television, comic books written in that genre are mostly ignored, and western movies have "tanked" more often than they've succeeded in recent years
With all of that in mind, I cringed when I heard that there was a re-make of The Lone Ranger in the works. It's one thing to use tropes of an obsolete genre as a backdrop for something else, but it's another thing entirely to try to revive a franchise which was a cornerstone of said obsolete genre for most of a frelling century — If they wanted to polish scraps of junk, I thought, they could have found something with a little less rust on it.
That train is going nowhere, is what I was saying.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my cringing turned out to be completely unnecessary. When I actually plunked down into a cinema chair to see The Lone Ranger, I got the only kind of surprise one should have to endure — a pleasant one. The Lone Ranger deftly avoided the cesspool which westerns embody in the same way that successful westerns always do these days: by not staying true to the flawed, poorly-written source material from which it came. In fact, it's not even accurate to say that the writers and director deviated from the source material: it would be more accurate to say that they treated the source as ore to be mined for a small amount of useful material, and then cast something sparkly from the refined end-product — something sparkly which bore no resemblance to the muddy hillsides the writers had to dig out to get the refined end-product.
Many people were worried that this version of Tonto was going to be the same slightly-racist caricature whom he was in the original radio series. I can confirm that this worry (which was questionable at best, since Johnny Depp is both proud of his Cherokee descent and wields more clout in Hollywood than director Gore Verbinski does) was entirely unfounded. In fact, the overall portrayal of the First Nations in The Lone Ranger was stimultaneously more human, more sympathetic, and more dignified than in some documentaries I've seen. Depp's Tonto was as much an eccentric "black sheep" as any of Depp's other roles, but the explanation given for his eccentricities in the eventually-revealed backstory made Tonto even more sympathetic and easy to relate to rather than paint the Natives as weird — and strengthened the plot in the process.
The bluecoats — who are often among the heroes of westerns, and usually for the same reasons that they are cast as adversaries by Native and Canadian storytellers — were not portrayed as unsullied heroes in this movie. Quite the contrary, the cavalry leaders who were shown were very human — they were corrupt, they were played for fools by smarter characters, and they felt the guilt of the crimes they committed instead of celebrating them. The blood on their hands — and their horror at it — was shown very, very clearly.
The movie's protrayal of women was (relatively) sophisticated, and eschewed most of the sexism which is prevalent in westerns. The genre is notorious for female characters being little more than merely either prey or decoration for male characters , but The Lone Ranger goes in the other direction for the most part: Helena Bonham Carter's character is both a sex worker and a more assertive personality than most of the male characters in the film; and the damsel-in-distress part portrayed by Ruth Wilson was at least filled out into a fully-developed character, rather than be left at the stock caricature which movie-goers often have to suffer the presence of.
The Lone Ranger himself was not really the hero of this story, and this Lone Ranger is where The Lone Ranger left the most of its raw source material on the slag-heap. Armie Hammer's Lone Ranger was still a blonde, white, middle-class all-American boy named John Reid, but with this being a reboot which re-cast the character's origin story, the similarity to previous iterations of the character ended there. This John Reid was naïve and overly-idealistic when he was introduced, completely ignorant of how backwards Texan culture was at the time in which the movie was set. For most of the movie, Tonto was almost dragging him along his path to hero-dom (when not saving him from predicaments which he got himself into as a result from his naïveté). This was an incredibly welcome and refreshing change from the past — the titular Lone Ranger was a too-perfect hero in past incarnations, and seeing him re-forged into a part with actual character development (and, finally, an explanation for his unreasonably-good marksmanship!) made this version of him worth watching. More than that, because this Reid only gradually grew into the responsibilities which were thrust upon him by the movie's events, he was forced to come to terms with the fact that the real America falls far short of the ideals it preaches, and he came to understand that he would have to fight if he wanted to make those ideals a reality — and thus his development paralleled that of a modern-day blonde, white, middle-class all-American boy (I actually applauded in the cinema when I realised that).
As for what genre this movie actually is, well…
Was it a Western? Not really. It took an approach to the source material somewhere between that of a spoof and that of a critique — and this is what made it resonate as far as I was concerned. What aspects of the western genre weren't brilliantly de-constructed during the film were actively mocked in a tongue-in-cheek manner, poor dialogue which the original radio and television series have turned into tropes was jokingly derided instead of being simply omitted, renditions of the characters were created which were actually memorable instead of being two-dimensional clichés — and the writing was very, very clever in its execution of this approach.
I realise that that does not tell you what genre(s) could have described this movie.
Okay, try this: It was a very dramatic action flick set in the American Old West, which included a lot of cleverly-written social commentary (particularly during a scene in which Tonto was asked what crime he'd committed) and regular doses of slap-stick comedy where appropriate.
I realise that that does not tell you what genre(s) could have described this movie, either. Okay, you've got me. I can't tell you what genre best described this movie, because this movie straddled too many lines. The important thing is that it was a very good film.
Unfortunately, the first slate of reviewers didn't agree — they apparently hated The Lone Ranger based on the rough cuts they were shown, and consequently the movie is already on its way out of theatres without having been seen by most of the movie-going public. I am very sorry that so many people were so grossly misled by so many of my colleagues, whose incompetence (unlike The Lone Ranger's franchise) is not likely to be corrected any time soon.
I strongly recommend that everyone rectify that when the DVD comes out on 2013-10-15.
* = in the process of doing this, Whedon inadvertently created something very close to "Wagon Train To The Stars" — much closer than Gene Roddenberry had had in mind when he used that phrase as part of a clever bit of "spin" (or, as it's more commonly known, "lying") to get NBC to produce STAR TREK, which Roddenberry was actually basing on C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower stories. Two lessons can be drawn from this: that lying pays; and that Mark Twain was correct about plagiarism.
