guaranteed rent for landlords | The Lone Ranger, review
We seek properties all over England for our guaranteed rent scheme. All properties must be clean, in a good state of repair, fit for human habitation and safe. If they are not we may be able to help you anyway so it is worth giving us a call.
Robbie Collin reviews Disney Pictures’ The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer.
Some films are created awful, some achieve awfulness, and some have awfulness thrust upon them. The Lone Ranger, the new Johnny Depp blockbuster directed by Gore Verbinski, falls cleanly into the third category: it has arrived from America a pre-ordained flop, trailing critical roastings and a disastrous opening weekend behind it. The film cost $250 million to make and is expected to make a $150 million loss: hi ho silver away, indeed.guaranteed rent for landlords
Commissioning a $250 million western based on a radio programme whose original fans will now be in their 80s is a feat of sheer pole-vaulting lunacy, but terrible business decisions do not necessarily lead to terrible film-making, and The Lone Ranger, while not without some serious problems, is a strange and fascinating and often thrilling movie artefact.
One possible explanation for its lousy reception in the US: it may be the most anti-American blockbuster ever made. The dazzlingly beautiful landscapes in the film are unmistakably those of John Ford, but the nation of thieves and scumbags who creep across them are pure Sergio Leone.
Armie Hammer, who played both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, co-stars as John Reid, who arrives in Colby, Texas, with a smart suit and a copy of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government under his arm. Reid is a firm believer in the rule of law – until, that is, the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) kills someone dear to him. (In one of the film’s many insane tonal wobbles, Butch cuts out and eats his victim’s heart.)
Left for dead in the desert, Reid is rescued by Tonto (Johnny Depp), a Comanche loner with a dead crow on his head, which he occasionally tries to feed crumbs. In the long list of Johnny Depp acting tics, this is one of the more irritating yet to surface, and even the film’s other characters acknowledge it.guaranteed rent for landlords
Together, Reid and Tonto unite to bring Butch to justice, although the conspiracy they unearth also involves Tom Wilkinson’s venal railroad baron, Cole, who dreams of a continent brought together by steam.
To him, the Native Americans his work will displace are nothing more than collateral damage. In one scene, Cole conducts a hostile takeover of the railroad company, literally shooting a fellow investor in the back, while the forces of the law turn the other way, distracted by a phalanx of strumpets led by a one-legged brothel madam played by – who else? – Helena Bonham Carter. All the while, The Star-Spangled Banner plays ironically in the background. And to think this film bombed in America!
But Verbinski, who previously worked with Depp in the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, shows more ambition here than he did in that entire trilogy: he borrows shots and ideas from Ford and Leone, and also Buster Keaton, whose comic epic The General is referenced extensively in the film’s rip-roaring train chase finale. Hans Zimmer’s rousing score uses Rossini’s William Tell Overture and also cherry-picks motifs from Ennio Morricone’s work with Leone, particularly Once Upon a Time in the West.
Who is the film for? Who knows? Depp and Hammer’s sparky double-act will appeal to children, the violence is never as tough as it is in, say, Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, and the undercurrent of bitterness might not be apparent to younger viewers. But in truth, this is one for connoisseurs of Hollywood hubris. The Lone Ranger is a grand folly that, in a sane world at least, would never have been made, although I’m really rather glad someone did.
View the original article here