Abandon Ship: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN:DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

The fifth in a series that once represented welcome freshness in the blockbuster formula, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is only enjoyable insofar as it can occasionally remind you of how much more fun you had at the other ones. Gore Verbinski managed to revitalize the old pirate swashbuckler with 2003’s Curse of the Black Pearl, a perfectly structured adventure movie let loose with an endlessly charming cast and its director’s elaborate visual imagination – cursed seafarers turning into skeletons by moonlight, and funny visual gags involving sinking ships, subverting expectations, and Buster Keaton-ish choreography. Then there was, of course, the loopy, unpredictable mannerisms of the ditzy, tipsy, rascally scoundrel Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp in the most wholly successfully enjoyable performance of his career, bringing in great eccentric surprise from the margins of every scene. The rest of the trilogy allowed Verbinski to go wilder with his terrific eye for spectacle, then a fourth – a coda for which the director and some of the main cast didn’t return – managed to eke out its charms by not spoiling the affection built up by its predecessors. This time around, though, what once felt like a new approach to an old subgenre is now waterlogged and predictable itself. 

Once again, we’re introduced to a band of ghost pirates intoning about curses and revenge. This time it’s a Spanish crew led by Javier Bardem (speaking incomprehensibly through a mouthful of black bile) who are undead, trapped on their zombie ship in a cave. They crave freedom to sail the seas and slay the pirate who left them for dead. Wouldn’t you know it? That pirate was Jack Sparrow. Depp slurs in, playing the once-fun character as the drunkest and loopiest he’s ever been. His timing is off, the mannerisms are twitchier, and the charm is mostly gone. Now he’s not flirty and sly; he’s leering and grotesque. Still, there are times when he stirs from his stupor long enough to pull off a fun bit of action, like a fantastic slice of dark comedy involving an intricately choreographed guillotine gone wrong. To assist in filling out an adventure plot around this decaying caricature is a new fresh-faced hero, a young chap we’re told is the child of the trilogy’s stars, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. (That Brenton Thwaites is a pretty man who looks like the exact midpoint between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley helps sell the parentage.) There’s also a young lady scientist accused of being a witch (Kaya Scodelario). They meet crossing paths in pursuit of Poseidon’s Trident, an ancient device that controls all sea curses or whatever. It’s always something. 

The new filmmakers at the helm are Norwegian directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, whose Kon Tiki is just the sort of straight-down-the-middle foreign film that gets you a Hollywood job. With a blandly competent anonymous style, they steer the franchise through choppy waters – a screenplay that’s pulling apart at the seams, old performances rapidly diminishing their appeal, and a tangle of convoluted new mythos that labors under its nonsensical approach to continuity. The aesthetics merely recycle what’s worked before – crumbling undead, soggy ships, sharp period costume – mixing in a few new sights – ghost sharks, a jewel-encrusted island. The action alternates between big and memorably stupid (a sort of restaging and one-upping of Fast Five’s bank vault finale, but on horseback) and big and boring (gloopy CG waterfalls and incoherent swordplay). As for navigating the series’ tonal balance or managing tricky performances, that’s where the movie falls flat the most. It flows out as a procession of incidents involving vacant figures, played with an exaggerated insistence on forced frivolity. There’s simply no consistent emotional tug or easily comprehensible motivation pulling it along when the movie must remind us of the stakes in increasingly desperate explanations.

It’s bad enough Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay is constantly repeating itself, introducing every bout of exposition at least three times and throwing the characters into each scrape – jail cells, double crosses, hidden islands, and so on – at least twice. But for the new leads to remain only vaguely attractive blanks filled in with the scantest motivation and the old characters to appear reduced to barely more than moving Colorforms of their former selves? That’s where the movie’s total lack of tension, chemistry, and energy really starts to drag. There’s little about the movie that follows naturally out of what came before it in its predecessors’ continuity, making this at this point a series dragged out only for the sake of profit and not for invention of even a meager sort. Even the nods to old MacGuffins are convoluted and forced. There are fleeting moments of fun spectacle, that familiar stirring score, and a few choice cameos. But that it has its passably diverting moments only makes the soggy slog around it more tediously disappointing.

Squeak and Gibber: ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to 2010’s live-action Alice in Wonderland, tasks director James Bobin (of Flight of the Conchords and the two most recent Muppets movies) with turning out imitation Tim Burton. It’s quite a task considering its predecessor was already Burton himself doing imitation Burton. (It’s easily his worst film, a few appealing grace notes in an ornately garish and dispassionate self-parody.) That Looking Glass manages to be a good movie in spots is a nice surprise. For maybe fifteen minutes total I thought Bobin and screenwriter Linda Woolverton were on to something, finding Alice (Mia Wasikowska, never an unwelcome sight) a ships’ captain in 1875, eager to go exploring. The only problem is these real-world scenes are bookends for a whole lot of consequence-free nonsense in Wonderland taking up the bulk of the movie. Not only does every bit of the story get undone by the end, but it even rolls back some of the last one, too.

Following the template of its predecessor, this new movie follows Alice through token scenes of struggles with her real problems – this time patriarchal business snobs, revealed in a quiet funny cut to wrinkled, bearded white grumps, who can’t even begin to imagine a woman explorer – then spirits her away to Wonderland for a fantastical topsy-turvy fantasy story. There are some clever bits here and there, like a Humpty Dumpty egg rolling off a gigantic chessboard, a doorway opening onto a great height, and, nestled in a chained up grandfather clock, an enormous castle containing time’s master clock. The weirdly unpopulated realm is, however, awfully low on characters who become more than set dressing. It’s also low on conflict. The best the contractually obligated returning creatures – like Tweedledee and Tweedledumb (Matt Lucas’s face floating on enormous CGI heads), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) – can come up with is concern about the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, creepy mannered gibbering passing as creativity) who has been acting strange lately. How can they tell?

It turns out the Hatter is upset by memories of his family, who were killed by the Jabberwocky controlled by the vengeful Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter). Alice is encouraged to go back in time and save the Hatter’s family. To do so, she meets Time (Sacha Baron Cohen chewing over a deliriously silly accent), a clockwork stickler for the rules of time and space. She outwits him quickly, hopping in a spinning gewgaw that allows her to sail the timeline back into the past. This initial flying spasm of effects leads to the movie’s cleverest moment as Time zips after her shouting, “You can’t win a race against time! I’m inevitable!” Later we learn he waits for no man. Also the Cheshire Cat at one point sprawls out on his shoulders and declares that he’s “on time.” You take your small delights where you can get them in a movie that has a lot of movement and noise, but short supply of actual wit or compelling curiosity. Bobin tries his best to provide vibrant colorful images, but the more they pile up the less they add up.

The stifling artificiality of the gaudy colorful sets and costumes has none of the imagination to power actual whimsy, and the plot itself is motored by the flimsiest of motivations. Who cares if Alice can take the Mad out of the Hatter? Not me. It’s not an enjoyable story to be lost in when its very mechanics operate against investment. Its best moments occur when Alice steps back into reality, her adventures in Wonderland having no bearing on the real world and never carrying enough emotional weight to represent metaphoric developments. The movie drains the beautifully logical illogic of its Lewis Carroll source through the blandness of conventional fantasy tropes, and looks all the worse for it. And the whole thing, burdened with an achingly predictable MacGuffin-based plot, is not nearly as delightful as it should be to excuse so much swirling around hither and yon across flat backdrops and Toontown sets dusted with hallucinogenic cartoon filigree. It’s just pointless, plodding gobbledygook. Nothing sticks in the brain. Nothing is worth digesting. Imagine being slowly buried alive in a bottomless vat of cotton candy.

Bad Fellas: BLACK MASS

Black Mass is a true crime gangster picture that doesn’t have a perspective or opinion on the events it recounts. It is content to grimly reenact backroom power plays and violent hits without caring too much about what it meant to the people involved, let alone using the proceedings as windows into their psyches. Set in Boston during the reign of crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who muscled out the Italian mob to become the city’s main source of organized crime, the screenplay makes clear the ties of neighborhood loyalty. This allowed Bulger to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with an FBI agent who once was a schoolyard chum, feeding information about his rivals while receiving a blind eye to his own criminal enterprises. This, along with a senator for a brother, allowed him to remain untouched for decades.

Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Get on Up) start in 1975 and work their way to 1995, following Bulger from humble nastiness to king of crime before it all unravels for him. Perhaps assuming the target audience has seen some gangster stories play out before, the film is not particularly interested in the how or what of its characters’ schemes, and is never clear about the nature of his income. Instead, it features tight close-ups and slow zooms highlighting small shifts in negotiations and power plays. The recurring moments are either intimately creepy – Bulger staring down another person with intimidating intensity until they give him what he wants – or violent, with killings telegraphed beyond the point of surprise arriving with nonetheless brutal force. What are we to make of these murders? Only that they’re senseless, I suppose.

A large ensemble of reliable talents slurring through a variety of phony Boston accents keep things watchable and reasonably interesting on a moment by moment basis. Joel Edgerton is a slimy FBI agent too close to Bulger, protecting him from his law enforcement colleagues (Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll) and their suspicions they’re not getting appropriately valuable intel for all the damage caused. Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, and W. Earl Brown are Whitey’s flunkies, who do a lot of the beating and killing, and drop in and out of the narrative. Benedict Cumberbatch is Bulger’s brother, affectionate but precious about keeping his office out of crime. And in this masculine environment of jockeying for power and speaking in deep whispers, a trio of female roles (for Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, and Juno Temple) exists to provide people who think this whole thing is dangerous but have no way of stopping it.

The proceedings are the sort of surface seriousness that coasts on the appearance of heavy subject matter without actually engaging with the thematic content that could exist under the surface. Cooper’s too interested in directing the logistics of the large ensemble, making sure everyone’s posing in the correct period detail and mushing their Rs into appropriate vaguely Bostonian sounds. The potentially fascinating story of corruption and crime is told through solid craft, Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography finely textured, David Rosenbaum’s editing steadily accumulating mild dread at the story’s most dramatic moments of threat. But there’s never a sense of what all the blood and backstabbing really means for the people involved beyond the simple facts of the case, and no foothold for either a formless “that’s life” truthiness or rigorous moralizing. It goes straight up the middle, ending up nowhere.

The mystery at the center remains the man himself, a presence and an instigator throughout the narrative who somehow remains stubbornly out of focus. How did he first rise to power? What made him the top Irish mobster? What did he think about what he did? We don’t know from this film. Here he seems to emerge fully formed from the shadows. Played by Johnny Depp at his least communicative and yet somehow as, if not more, affected than his Mortdecai or Mad Hatter, his countenance is entombed in artifice. Dead ice blue eyes pop against sickly pale skin, his face remolded out of makeup effects into something that’s always off-putting and unnatural. His Bulger is spooky, moving stiffly, holding his posture rigid, always frowning. He lurks in dark corners, most creepy when he stands hidden in an empty church nook, or when he interrupts a woman reading The Exorcist to calmly, threateningly run his hand along her face and neck.

Presenting the facts in a style synthesized and hollowed out from an amalgamation of every gangster picture that came before is one thing. But to plunk a performance like Depp’s in the middle of it – so artificial, so designed, so immediately signaling evil – is strange. It’s an interesting approach, more Karloff than DeNiro, more Michael Myers than Brando. He doesn’t seem like a real person. He looks like he should’ve been featured in Famous Monsters of Filmland fifty years ago. It makes impossible the notion we should take this seriously as a look into the face of real evil that men do. Besides, the movie’s too unfocused to even activate the Nosferatu qualities of Depp’s work. It’s a case of a project with a script, a director, and a lead performance working at cross purposes. It’s too shallow to be a weighty exploration of crime and punishment, too restrained to be pulpy fun, and too unwilling to follow an eccentric lead into a more overtly nightmarish direction. It’s competent enough to work scene by scene, but adds up to a missed opportunity all around.

Uses of Enchantment: INTO THE WOODS

After over a decade of box office success with revisionist fairy tales of one sort (Shrek) or another (Snow White and the Huntsman) or another (Maleficent), I suppose it was about time Hollywood got around to adapting Stephen Sondheim’s original Grimm mashup, Into the Woods. That musical, co-written with James Lapine, was first produced in 1986. It took long enough for something so cinematic and imaginative as this series of head-on collisions between a variety of classic tales made it to the screen. Perhaps the delay was simply how much further the material takes its revisionist impulses, to a place darker and more destabilizing to the very idea of fairy tales than those others dare.

Disney, no stranger to wonderful fairy tales, but rarely willing to overtly dig down dark, has brought the stage to the screen with director Rob Marshall, whose Chicago put a layer of dreamy glitz on a sordid murder musical. The resulting Into the Woods adaptation, scripted by Lapine with music supervision by Sondheim, gets at what’s most provocative about the story, stripping away layers of feel-good fantasy while attempting to still let some sentimental magic in around the edges. It’s a partial equivocation to crowd pleasing in a more conventional sense, pulling back from a few of the nastier moments, but remains admirably committed to being a big feel-bad musical, a bunch of great lyrics and melody with a bittersweet aftertaste.

The opening sets a collection of familiar characters – Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack who will have the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) – off on their recognizable stories. The first twist is placing them all in the same world, crossing paths, each story’s simple patterns trailing ripple effects through the others’. The second twist is a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt), childless because of a witch (Meryl Streep) and her curse, heading out into the woods to get the curse reversed. The ingredients they must collect: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair yellow as corn, and a slipper pure as gold. This quest brings them into direct conflict with the other plotlines, further complicating simple tales.

By the midpoint, every story has reached its happy ending, everyone happily married off or with child or rich. The only people disfigured or blinded are wicked stepsisters. But then the real story begins, revealing happily ever after to be short lived. Their wishes have been granted, and yet their lives are no easier, and choices they made to get there have unintended consequences. The easy morality of fairy tales leaves these characters unprepared for dissatisfaction, revenge, abandonment, infidelity, and death. That’s the sour note of real life infecting giddy childhood fantasy. And so the movie follows suit, buzzing with clever Grimm knottiness for an hour before tipping over into sadness and upsetting developments. Sondheim’s play is about the limits of life lessons gleaned from these tales, and how destabilizing it can be to feel alone in the world without easy answers to guide you.

The movie version gets there, but it’s by its very nature flashier, cutting between storylines quickly and inelegantly, making an occasional jumble out of its various strands. Trims to the plot, especially in the back half, foreshorten motivations and rush the revelations. But there are smaller miscues of editing. Early on we’re told about a prince, singular, throwing a festival. Then a few cuts later, we meet a prince, a different one. In the last third, two characters die in different ways, presented so obliquely it may as well be off screen. Their fates aren’t clear until other characters tell us later. One literally falls out of frame, later revealed to have been a fatal plunge from a cliff, not a trip over a branch as one could reasonably assume.

Stumbles of staging aside, there’s a fine patina of fakery to it all. The woods never feel like a real place, just a soundstage. I didn’t mind it much.  The set has its charms and Marshall finds real emotional engagement between his actors that enlivens the glittering falsehoods around them. Corden and Blunt’s bakers are especially good, with breezy repartee and excellent timing. Kendrick’s charming as always, this time as a flustered indecisive young woman. These three are the heart of the picture, shouldering the burden of the tonal shifts while Streep hams it up howling and cackling in the background as the witch goads the stories forward. Elsewhere, there’s room for small but juicy comic parts played with aplomb by Chris Pine, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp, Lucy Punch, and more. They’re welcome flavoring to this world.

Marshall steps out of his cast’s way and lets them spill forth with Sondheim’s delectable wordplay, rhyming, punning, and clattering with all manner of delightful alliterations that trip off the tongue and sweet simple poetic constructions that sit pleasantly on the ear. The big musical moments land because of the writing, and the skill with which the performers feel it. These little moments, aching with yearning and surprise, work wonders. But the big picture doesn’t cohere in the way it should. The story’s pacing’s off and the staging imprecise, but the hopeful bittersweet conclusion is affecting, even if the remaining pieces feel a tad forced to fit. Masterpieces of one medium rarely retain that status in the leap to another. That Into the Woods is a good movie, but not a great one, is only a minor disappointment.

Blubber Horror: TUSK

When Kevin Smith sets out to make a movie about a man who gets captured by an old eccentric with plans to turn him into a walrus, you can almost hear the glee he had in creating a concept so unusual. If you stick around through the end credits, you can actually hear it in an excerpt from the podcast on which he first thought up the idea. Now Tusk is a feature film playing at a theater near you and so very badly wants to be a new cult classic that every single strange detail feels included to fit that mold instead of bubbling up honestly out of a cracked vision pursued to illogical ends. It’s too calculating to be a passionate work of the macabre.

Smith’s an interesting case. He’s been making films for two decades now, largely on his own terms. He began, with Clerks and Chasing Amy, as a scrappy, raunchy indie director with some potential. With his dark Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma and sweetly dirty rom-coms like Jersey Girl and Zack and Miri, he seemed poised to grow as a filmmaker and activate that potential. Instead, he’s never grown. He’s always moving sideways, into dumb empty comedies, like Cop Out, or uncompromising overstuffed horror riffs, like Red State.

With Tusk, he’s striving for a midnight movie brand of queasy horror comedy. The results are filled with as much dead air and relentlessly unfunny banter as he’s ever created. It is a weird little movie that appears to have no reason to exist beyond proving Smith still has enough indie clout to get a small, strange, stupid thing on a lot of screens. Its attempts at humor do not add appreciably to the odd bit of body horror at the center. Instead, it seems to be apologizing for itself as it goes along. It shows something peculiar and grotesque, and then laughs it off. Only kidding, Smith says. Would that it be funnier, or creepier.

It stars Justin Long as an incredibly unlikable, caustic, sleazy, jerk podcaster who travels to Canada to interview a viral video star. When he arrives, his subject is, shall we say, suddenly permanently unavailable. Searching for a good replacement subject, he finds his way to a big creepy house in the middle of nowhere where an eccentric elderly man (Michael Parks) promises to tell his life story in exchange for company. The man’s a loon, and soon the podcaster is being fitted for a suit of walrus skin, ready to be sewn into his own epidermis. Meanwhile, Long’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and co-host (Haley Joel Osmet) go looking for their missing friend, teaming up with a Québécois investigator (Johnny Depp, going uncredited under a layer of sloppy makeup and sloppier accent work).

I just don’t know about this. Smith has roped in talented people. Long’s so good at being so terrible that the walrus at first seems to be fitting karmic retribution, though I’m not sure he’s supposed to be as bad as he comes across. Parks commits to his character’s creepy eccentricities, howling and murmuring and gleefully preparing for the debut of his long-awaited walrus-man friend. “Oh, Mr. Tusk,” he moans, sizing up his rubbery creation. He’s apparently arriving from another, better, version of this film.

Everyone else flails around in endless scenes devoid of suspense or laughs. It’s just dead on arrival. Rodriguez commits so fiercely to an underwritten role that I felt a little uncomfortable watching all that emoting go to waste. Osmet’s a long way from his earlier, better, child performances in The Sixth Sense and A.I., but you can catch glimmers of the good actor still in there. Depp is simply embarrassing, delivering quite possibly the worst performance of his career. The truth is that even with two (two!) Oscar nominees in the cast, no amount of acting could save this movie from itself.

The best that can be said about Tusk is that it exists. The entirety of its imagination has been expended on the premise, and on naming the man-who-might-be-a-walrus Wallace. But it’s also a failure of execution. It often looks bad, overlit and poorly staged. It’s tonally sloppy. Its pacing is lumpy, scenes stretching on and on. Its writing is tediously self-satisfied. I sat there watching a film fall apart around my very eyes. I was mildly diverted by the unpredictability of it all, but it’s hardly a fruitful strangeness. Tusk is so desperate to laugh at its own oddities, it doesn’t seem weird at all. It’s an attempt to make good trash that flirts with good before deciding to consign itself to the dumpster. 

Flesh is Weak: TRANSCENDENCE

In Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant computer scientist who, given only weeks to live, agrees to try to upload his consciousness into his artificial intelligence experiment, thus creating the world’s first truly self-aware computer. The primary side effect – immortality – is just a nice bonus. The movie uses that hook as a reason to grapple with fascinating thematic questions of the kind Ray Kurzweil might enjoy. If a person’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and cognitive abilities can be copied into a bank of hard drives, is that person still alive? The scientist’s wife (Rebecca Hall) would like to think so. An accomplished tech theorist in her own right, she was the one who came up with the designs to upload him in the first place. Their colleagues (Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman) are a little more skeptical.

When the man is gone, all that’s left are the lines of code bleeping across monitors, digitally reconstructing the voice of the dead man. Give me more power, it pleads. Connect me to the Internet. Does that sound like something a person wants? What does it mean to be whatever that thing is? How integrated with tech can you be and still be yourself? If HAL 9000 had all the memories of and sounded like the love of your life, would you believe him? The film is best when it’s asking these questions, but it’s woefully unprepared to engage with them in any meaningful way. It’s primed for pulpy eggheaded pleasures and turns up only shrugs.

What is at times fun about Transcendence is watching the slow creation of an accidental supervillain. If you ever wondered how one of those cavernous lairs full of whirring computers and mindless worker bees gets started, look no further. Hall, full of mostly good intentions and racing to beat an anti-tech terrorist organization led by a bleach-blonde Kate Mara, connects the digital Depp to the Internet. Off he zooms – a goofily nifty visual zips through a literal web of information and screenshots – building in power and intelligence until he has his wife constructing a giant data center in the middle of the desert, the better to house his massive potential for good. Of course, if you’ve seen any movie about a supercomputer from Demon Seed to Smart House, you know he has a massive potential for evil and destruction as well. You can probably guess where it goes from there.

The movie is at once smarter than that sounds and dumber than it looks. It’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer behind such beautiful-looking filmic efforts as Inception, Moneyball, and The Dark Knight. He and Jess Hall, his director of photography, create handsome compositions that use stillness and simplicity to great effect. Clean, empty corridors seem so ominous. Shots of wide open spaces seem gorgeously, creepily vast. The spaces in which the technophobia parable plays out echo with dread and possibility. There’s a throwback appeal to the imagery, reminiscent of early Spielberg in its insistent energy, yet locked-down patience that represents a willingness to let the situation unfold crisply and inevitably. It’s a visual confidence that carries the picture far.

What’s less satisfying by far is the way the film drops the thematic juggling act by letting the characters remain fuzzy, defined only by the dictates of the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem, but when the climactic resolution hinges on our investment in the characters it’d be nice to know them a little better. We don’t, and the plot isn’t cold or tight enough to work without them. There are terrific actors in every role – like Cillian Murphy, who does what he can with a one-note FBI agent – but no one ever rings true. Hall is the stand out, doing solid work playing a woman who is mourning her husband by obeying his simulacrum. It’s like an amped-up gender-swapped thriller version of Spike Jonze’s Her, steering forcefully into the creep factor. But her character is made to bend so fully to the will of the plotting that she hardly registers as a person let alone a genre archetype. The idea she inhabits is provocative, but her character is a shambles, able to shift from totally devoted to skeptical and back again in the span of a scene.

Jack Paglen’s screenplay feels like a Michael Crichton novel, full of jargon that sounds half-plausible to an amateur ear and futurist paranoia convinced tech evolutions will inevitably end disastrously for humanity. Pfister directs it capably, finding the thrills where it counts and finding some nice shots – like a sun-dappled window in which hangs a circuit chip in the center of a dreamcatcher – to cut into the flow of mood and contemplation. It’s a sci-fi thriller that’s moseying around, overtly turning over ideas with great care and wonder without getting much below the surface of it all. Transcendence transcends nothing. Without humor or personality to speak of, it feels inert and underdeveloped, content to throw out provocative questions and let them dissipate before resolving, let alone following, those lines of inquiry.

Off the Rails: THE LONE RANGER

In a summer when so many Hollywood entertainments, even the halfway decent ones, seem to be on autopilot, it's a relief to find that The Lone Ranger boldly and confidently flies off the rails the first chance it gets. Here's an improbable movie: a darkly cartoonish 149 minute Western that's not only an attempt at bringing to today's audiences the adventures of the old white-hat radio-serial hero and his Native American sidekick, it is also a Fourth of July release in which capitalism and the U.S. Army are major villainous forces, and a live-action Disney movie with a subplot about a prostitute who has a wooden leg that's also a gun. At long last, 2013 has served up a summer tentpole where, no matter what you end up thinking about its quality, you won't hear a description and think "Oh, yeah, another one of those."

This is the work of Gore Verbinski, the talented director who brought us indelible entertainments like the shivery J-horror remake The Ring, the iconic Pirates of the Caribbean and its boisterously overstuffed sequels, and the madcap animated postmodern Western Rango. He has a knack for creating clear, creative imagery that rises out of unrestrained imagination without irretrievably swamping the narrative momentum of his films. The haunted videotape in The Ring contains perhaps the most memorably frightening collection of horror images of the last decade or so. The Pirates films are some of the best large-scale action fantasy efforts in recent memory. And Rango, why that's nothing short of a masterpiece, essentially putting part of the plot of Chinatown into a Western populated by animals and pulling out all the stops on a wild roller-coaster of set pieces, casual surrealism, and tricky thematic loop-de-loops.

His Lone Ranger is a bit of all of the above, bloated, messy, and prone to whiplash between tones in an instant. It's a film of woozy pseudo-mystic native spiritualism, a few red-blooded Rube Goldberg action sequences, and a heaping helping of reflexive genre criticism. There's almost too much going on at all times, but even when it contorts into awkward shapes and narrative confusion, there's bounteous visual satisfaction to be found. After a start in 1933 where an elderly Native American haltingly starts telling the story we're about to see to a young boy visiting a carnival, we're thrown right into the action. It's 1869 and a new prosecutor (Armie Hammer) is on a train to Texas. Also aboard is captured fugitive Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) who is promptly rescued by his gang who shoot up the train and cause it to crash past the station and slam into the sand. So you see, the film is already quite literally off the rails and the plot soon threatens to follow, with only Bojan Bazelli’s gorgeous widescreen celluloid cinematography and the eccentric period-piece bric-a-brac production design to hold it together.

A posse rides out to recapture the criminals, but the gang ambushes them, killing them all. But the prosecutor survives and, in a nod to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Western Dead Man, a helpful native finds him in the desert. Here the help is Tonto (Johnny Depp, in a performance full of weird tics again, but not entirely successfully), a strange man who wears apparently permanent war paint, a dead bird on his head, and seems to be speaking nonsense half the time. He’s looking to bring Cavendish to justice as well. They team up, Tonto advising the prosecutor to wear a mask, using his assumed death as a disguise to help in their search. With that, The Lone Ranger and Tonto begin their journey. It may seem easy enough, but with a plot this complicated, it takes some time to really get going.  As the hunt begins, so to does an all-out war between settlers and the Comanche after it appears a land treaty has been broken in the wake of the Transcontinental Railroad. As if that’s not enough, the film also contains a frontier woman (Ruth Wilson) and her son (Bryant Price) – the Ranger’s nephew – who get caught up in this conflict, as well as a U.S. military man (Barry Pepper), a tenacious railroad official (Tom Wilkinson), and the aforementioned peg-legged prostitute (Helena Bonham Carter). And did I mention that there’s silver in them there hills?

The strains of politics, greed, business, and revenge all twist about in a film that’s complicated, needlessly so, perhaps, and certainly overlong. It’s shockingly cruel and ugly, even literally, the characters are all sweaty and dirty, covered in dust, muck, and dried blood. It’s a "family film" featuring cannibalism, mass killings, a rough-and-tumble tone, and bone-deep cynicism about the future and oft-scoffed "progress." The script by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio is intent on undercutting easy heroism with gags and silliness amidst the historical sadism. It’s a Western with an understanding of the tragedy, the national sin, befalling the Native Americans. This is subversive stuff, occasionally clumsily handled, poking through a film that often feels close to sliding out of control and sometimes does.

It gains a sort of moral force from a wounded spirit that's also played as a joke. Tonto is a madman and an outcast. Years ago, we learn, his tribe was killed. He roams the desert seeking revenge. He babbles and pulls faces, using underestimation as his greatest defense. To treat Tonto as a joke and a tragedy is queasy-making, but the attempt is noble. It's better than playing it straight as simple condescension, even if the execution is questionable. It's a tricky, not entirely successful, portrayal, helped by Depp playing the elderly storyteller who frames the story as a story. Are we to take it all at face value? Not especially. The elderly Depp is housed in a carnival. The events of the film are not without nuance, but are largely broad and even vaguely satiric. Here's a film that's saying perhaps time has passed for these kinds of stories, but gee, aren't they fun anyways?

It's nearly a slog for a while, falling into an odd pattern of jokes, massacres, slapstick, and showdowns. In one scene, the cavalry chases down a tribe, and then we cut back to attempted humor from a horse licking the Lone Ranger's face. Hammer's square-jawed classical performance is sunny and without a hint of winking, the better for the odd details to accrue around him. Long scenes of halting banter between Hammer and Depp sometimes fall flatter than they should, but once plot and other actors enter the scene more forcefully they snap back into a sense of purpose. But even while drifting, it’s at least worth looking at, a film determined to echo John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Buster Keaton on its way to finding new images of its own.

Once all the pieces  fall into place, the film hurtles through a climactic series of events most satisfying, especially a massive sequence involving two trains and plenty of expertly and elaborately choreographed and clearly edited bits of action set to the “William Tell Overture.” To get there, though, is a mad, uneven jumble, but I can almost say it's worth it. The film is befuddling and beguiling, exhausting and exciting. I left worn out, but more than ever convinced that Verbinski's one of the best directors cooking up blockbusters in Hollywood today. In lesser hands this would've been even more of a mess than it already is. Here’s a work of visual invention and real subversion, albeit so bustlingly uneven that it made my head spin.

Update 7/6/13: 

My affection for the film lingered even as the critical reaction grew increasingly negative. I went back to the theater and saw it again, not because I wanted to see what others hated, but to see again the parts of the film I - and a band of defenders - admired. (I was especially craving another look at that dazzling climactic action sequence.) Upon a second viewing, my opinion of the film has only grown. I still think it's a film dangerously close to sliding out of control. But I'm more convinced that Verbinski's a filmmaker in complete control. There's a difference between a film that's tonally slippery and tonally sloppy. The Lone Ranger is the former. A common comparison kicking around cinephile circles, at least amongst those of us who like this picture, is Spielberg's to-this-day underrated Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Both films feature a structure – early and late action with comedy, shocking violence and gross out gags in between – and tonal mix – dark, strange, funny, exciting, silly – that could easily catch a viewer unaware and knock them clear out of enjoyment. But repeat viewings, when more fully aware of the big picture and the filmmaker's strategies, reveal a hurtling fine-tuned roller coaster of an adventure film. Those moments where the whole thing seemed to take a curve too fast and you thought the clattering contraption would go flying off in a deadly crash? That was no mistake. It was built to thrill. The Lone Ranger is a terrific film, boldly conceived and executed to subvert expectations. Instead of viewing the film as a failed version of what it's not, trying to fit the film into boxes - modern summer blockbuster, live-action Disney movie - into which it refuses to fit easily, it's far better to view and enjoy the film as it is.

Note: A second viewing also sharpened the plot for me. Scenes that I found a little confused at first are improved with the full knowledge of what's to come, a clarity that extends to some of Tonto's seemingly nonsense dialogue, which, when viewed within the full context, reveals that he's generally a step ahead of the Lone Ranger, and the audience as well.