Stellar performances in must-see Fruitvale

Fruitvale Station follows a man’s final day on Earth. He wakes up, plans a party, drives around, picks up his daughter, visits his mom, rides a train and then gets shot in the back by a cop while he’s facedown on the ground.

The man is Oscar Grant III and we ultimately know what happens to him because the film opens — like a punch to the gut — with the real cell phone footage of his death. The 2009 video is grainy and shaky, and you can barely make out what’s happening until you see the unmistakable silhouette of a handgun and then a lone pop. This is the footage that was played in court, inspired protests and incited riots. It’s the footage that tells everything about the Oscar Grant story, and yet nothing about Oscar Grant.

Fruitvale Station opened last week. I wasn’t able to review it then, but I saw it last weekend and it had such a profound effect on me that I had to double-back to tell you about it. It’s held together by a promising new director and screenwriter, Ryan Coogler, and by three outstanding performances by Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz and Octavia Spencer.

Jordan, who I will forever remember as the naïve young drug dealer Wallace on HBO’s The Wire, plays Grant, an ex-con with a history of drug dealing who decides it’s time to course correct his life when he ditches his drug stash into the Oakland Bay. It seems doubtful that Grant would dump his stash the same day of his death, but the film takes some dramatic liberties with the chronology to pack as much as it can into Grant’s final day. Another unlikely foreshadowing event: Grant is gassing up his car when he witnesses a pit bull get hit by a truck. He cradles the dog’s head as it takes its final breaths.

Fruitvale Station makes a distinct point to show us how Grant was not a saint. He struggled with drugs, he cheated on his girlfriend Sophina (Diaz), he frequently disappointed his doting mother (Spencer) and he couldn’t seem to hold onto a job. In an early scene he nearly assaults his boss when he won’t give Grant back a position he was fired from weeks before. These flaws seem to directly contradict Grant’s kind disposition, on full display when he picks up his daughter from school or when he charms a grumpy storeowner into letting his friends use a bathroom reserved only for employees. In another scene, he dials up his grandmother so she can explain how to fry fish to a complete stranger. The stranger, taken aback by Grant’s hoodie and long white T-shirt, seems shocked at herself for judging him by his appearance alone.

These dueling sides of Oscar Grant don’t ultimately matter though, especially at the Fruitvale BART station, where Grant and others are hauled off a train after a fight breaks out. The police don’t know Grant is a compassionate father, and they haven’t run his license to know that he has a long rap sheet either. The police only know what they see in front of them. And at some point, one of them saw a deadly threat. (The police officer, later convicted of involuntarily manslaughter, claims he meant to grab and fire his taser.)

Did race play a factor? The movie doesn’t really take a stance on the issue, instead presenting Grant’s last day as a memorial to his good nature and perseverance. It’s hard not to see race, though, especially when trying to imagine what would have happened had Oscar and all his friends been white instead of black. At the very least, Grant joins Emmett Till, James Byrd Jr. and Trayvon Martin, whose last journeys home proved fatal and then opened up a national dialogue about being black in America.

The movie nudges you into thinking about race, but never pushes or shoves. Really though, this incredible must-see movie

is more about Oscar Grant and how he had so much potential in him before he was facedown on a train platform with cop’s knee in his head. He had hopes and dreams and a family willing to cheer him on wherever he went next.

And then he was gone. That’s a tragedy no matter what color you are.

Cross Indonesia off your travel list

Some very morbid and surreal qualities are deep at work within the macabre play-acting of The Act of Killing. It would be utterly bonkers if it weren’t a documentary.

In 1965, after a failed coup amid a communist uprising, the Indonesian army began a mass extinction of known communists that went on for more than a year. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 500,000 to 2.5 million. Director Joshua Oppenheimer apparently went to Indonesia to learn about the killings, and was shocked to hear the candor and pride in the killers’ voices. He asked them to recreate their political purge, which they did with joyous glee. The Act of Killing is essentially their confession.

The film follows one of the killers, Anwar Congo, who was enlisted right off the street — where he was selling black-market movie theater tickets — to question, torture and eventually execute suspected communists. Another killer estimates Congo murdered 1,000 people or more. In 1965, Congo was known as a terrifyingly ice-cold killer. He was feared by even his allies. Today he’s a tall, lanky grandfather with a warm, toothy smile. He looks like a leaner Nelson Mandela. In one of the first scenes, Congo describes how he would tie wire to a wall, wrap it around a victim’s neck and then pull. “This is the best way to kill,” he says, later adding that his white pants would not have been appropriate for such work. “Dark-colored pants only,” Congo says with a smile.

The film features other men, including members of the Pancasila Youth, a militia movement known for its violent purge of communists. Pancasila members wear predatory camouflage, like Bengal tigers. At one point, Pancasila militants are taped walking through a market extorting Chinese vendors. One merchant seems paralyzed with fear, tears building in his eyes, as he hands over all his money.

Congo and other killers — who obsessively use the word “gangsters” interchangeably with “free men” — are paraded at political events to throngs of cheering supporters. In one haunting scene, they appear on an Indonesian TV show and the young host praises the cold-blooded, government-sanctioned murder they did for Indonesia. Imagine Katie Couric praising Dr. Josef Mengele with that enthusiasm on primetime. The Act of Killing is a killer’s confession, and also an indictment on an entire country that seems to be at great peace with its bloody history.

Intercut throughout the picture are scenes written, choreographed and directed by Congo, who instructs his actors to plead for their lives like the communists under his knife did in 1965. They use actors, sets, prosthetic and makeup effects, and stunts to demonstrate their savagery against the communists. Everyone seems very willing to play a killer, but no one wants to play the communists — the stigma is still too powerful, even for play-acting. At one point, Congo volunteers to be mock strangled by his infamous wire. He chokes and sputters, and then sits there contemplatively for a long time. You can see fear in his eyes, and anguish in his face. The movie ends with an emotional breakthrough: Anwar Congo, finally realizing he’s a monster, dry heaving at the site of his murders. This is not redemption, though, and the film knows this as it lingers over Congo as he convulses pathetically.

What's most remarkable is how hateful everyone is: they talk of murder as if it were taking out the trash or tilling a field. One of Congo's fellow killers turns up and he tells everyone to tone down the violence or "people will think we were the cruel ones and not the communists." Someone can be heard saying, hard to tell who with the subtitles, that the communists "were never cruel, only us." Even many of the political elite in Indonesia seem to be in on the madness. We see generals, militia leaders and even the vice president gloating about the violent purge; it's no different than Nazis high-fiving over dead Jews today. At one point one general turns to his female golf caddie and callously asks if she still has that mole on her vagina. Other men discuss raiding villages and finding 14-year-olds to rape. Evil has never been so proudly endorsed in the modern age.

Oppenheimer, with backing from documentary greats Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, creates a vivid picture of murder, fanaticism and history in The Act of Killing. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The subjects’ unblinking honesty is terrifying; the way they’re treated like national treasures, even more so.

Sixth time's the charm for Wolverine

Hugh Jackman changing a tire. Hugh Jackman learning how to file his taxes online. Hugh Jackman ordering a sandwich, and then taking it back and complaining because, well, "Wolverine don't do mayonnaise."

These are just some of the plots that could have bested the last Wolverine movie, the atrociously written X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the one with Ryan Reynolds and that singer with all the extra punctuation in his name. I'm happy to report that its sequel, simply called The Wolverine, went well beyond what was required to finally — finally! — tell an appropriate story involving the X-Men's least obnoxious figure, a man with metal-coated bones and a hairdo that has tailfins.

Jackman, hulky and bulky in layers of muscle, again returns as Logan, the brooding self-healing strongman with razor claws that eject out from between his knuckles. This is not Jackman's finest character, but he plays Wolverine with such enthusiasm and warmth that you can't help but appreciate his fondness for the lovably gruff mutant. That's why we all want these Wolverine appearances to succeed, and why we get frustrated when they don't, like they so often do.

This one finds its soul by ditching all the other mutants and focusing largely on Logan and his troubled history following the cataclysmic events of X-Men: The Last Stand. For large swaths of the film's Japanese setting, The Wolverine features only Logan doing very Logany things: he rambles through forests, he revisits his past, he convinces himself that he's not worthy of love, and he's haunted by visions of his dead girlfriend, the telekinetic overlord Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who died and apparently went to a Victoria Secret store — she spends every dream in slinky little nightgowns cooing in Logan's ears.

Logan is taken to Japan by a man he meets in the opening scene, which involves a horrifying ground-level view of the nuclear bomb obliterating Nagasaki during World War II. Logan, resistant to pretty much any kind of damage including vaporizing nuclear plasma bubbles, saves a young Japanese soldier who showed him kindness. Seventy years later, the soldier is old and dying, and Logan is still his youthful self thanks to those mutant chromosomes. The retired soldier, now a tech tycoon with a vast empire, has a proposal that Logan first refuses, but later gets embroiled in against his better judgment. It begins with the Japanese mob, the Yakuza, but quickly turns into one of those too-big-to-fail corporate power struggles — because that’s what the X-Men do now, they rescue rich people.

The movie is very Japanese, with many Japanese cultural checkpoints: video-game parlors, traditional Japanese wood and paper houses, hundreds of ninjas in their footed pajamas and a bullet train, on which an action scene with a rather stupendous and wonderful finale is set. I was shocked to see in the end credits that the movie was not filmed in Japan, but rather Australia. I want to smack the producers for not filming in the story’s real country, but bravo to the set dressers; they did convincing work.

I love the plot’s solemn Japanese setting, and also the film's low-key presence: the world isn't ending, there are very few other mutants, the story is personal and intimate, not sweeping and epic, and most of the fight sequences are grounded in natural physics with an emphasis on realism. Only at the end does the movie lose its marbles when it shuffles in a giant silver samurai with swords that look more like electric hair straighteners. There's also a poison-spitting temptress, a cross between Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin and Brigitte Nielson’s Soviet princess from Rocky IV. Her dialogue, consisting mostly of drab one-liners, is all kinds of awful.

Really, though — and this will be no surprise to X-Men fans — Jackman and Wolverine are the legitimate stars here. We meet up with Logan as he wanders through the forests of the Northwest. He shares a scene with a CGI, and later animatronic, bear that seems to recognize Wolverine as his forest kin, and a worthy adversary. Director James Mangold frequently paints Wolverine as the compassionate savage, and it often works to varying degrees of success. I think fans are drawn to Wolverine mostly because Jackman is so charismatic and likable, but also because the Logan character has so much rattling up in his troubled dome. He's eternally conflicted about his past and even more so about his future. All that plays very well here, even as Jackman grunts his way through most of his action sequences.

The Wolverine is a little long, but not overly so. The action scenes are thrilling, especially that bit on the bullet train. It’s interesting to see Wolverine kill people, which he frequently does in eviscerating style. We’re so accustomed to Spider-Man, Batman and Superman handling villains with kid gloves, but here Wolverine removes threats against him with fatal force. That’s what I liked.

What I didn’t like was mostly the Viper character and the giant silver samurai, both of which worked against the film’s realistic approach to a Wolverine story. These comic-based additions reminded me too much of the other X-Men movies, which I found to be crowded and messy. The Wolverine has large sections that are clearly steps away from those movies, and I think those will thrill viewers most.

After all, the movie is called The Wolverine, not Wolverine and Friends. Rest assured that you’ll get your money’s worth of the hero you paid to see.

Unlikely sequel ignites unlikely heroine

James Bond doesn’t misfire his gun at his desk. He doesn’t stutter his way through an interrogation. He definitely doesn’t awkwardly eyeball potential suspects in chic French cafés. For all these reasons and many more, James Bond is a capable spy, but this isn’t a story about James Bond. It’s about Sarah, a super spy’s clueless girlfriend.

Sarah is played by Mary-Louise Parker in one of those roles that’s too refreshing for the movie that contains it. Sarah is still coming to grips with the events of the original Red, in which her boyfriend Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a retired government assassin, kidnapped her in an overly complicated, yet whimsical, plot concerning lots of government secrets. Here, Sarah is again bound into an even more complex plot, with even more whimsy. If you liked the first Red, you’ll find this sequel’s delivery enjoyably familiar.

Red 2’s rambunctious spirit, darting from one high-octane encounter to another, is a strange mixture of grim government paranoia — with lots of murder — and trivial slapstick at its goofiest. These competing tonal shifts frequently work against each other, even as scenes of contract killers executing secretaries with silenced pistols transition into mid-gunfight lovers’ quarrels. I didn’t like these opposing forces, mostly because I preferred Red 2’s sillier side over its bloody other half.

And by silly, I mean Sarah kissing her captives because … “well, it works in the movies.” Or Sarah begging for Frank to take a new spy contract from the baked beans aisle at the nearby Costco. Or Sarah launching a European car down a narrowing alley until it’s so wedged in that the scene sent claustrophobia-induced shivers up my arms. I like Sarah, and I love how Parker plays her: flighty, ditzy, maniacally eager to use a gun and jealous of Frank’s spy conquests, especially that curvy KGB spy with hipster bangs (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Willis, for his part, plays into Parker’s manic giddiness. They often reminded me of the cheery-fun Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies, except with lots more guns and murder.

Once again joining the RED team — “retired, extremely dangerous” — are Marvin (John Malkovich), the LSD-bred yahoo, and Victoria (Helen Mirren), the ice queen whose sexualized prowess with guns and killing machines seems to contradict her polished, queen-like nature. Yes, the joke here is that Helen Mirren, a frequent film queen, is a plucky killer. Red 2 beats this motif over your head, but I couldn’t help but smile as another spy (Brian Cox) finds titillating amusement out of Victoria’s sniper stance: flat on her belly with a stocking’d foot raised, arched and twinkling like a ballerina’s.

Between Willis, Parker, Malkovich and Mirren, Red 2 is a full house. But then it feels compelled to add a bunch more stuff, including the Zeta-Jones character and other double-, triple- and quadruple-crossing spy agents. Neal McDonough turns up as a hired gun, as does a mini-gun totin’ Byung-hun Lee, who never forgives the theft of his private jet. Anthony Hopkins turns up as a crazy scientist who was locked up in an insane asylum decades earlier. There is a government oversight committee, CIA, FBI, NSA, senators, generals, competing hitmen, the KGB, MI6 … it all gets very convoluted very fast. Making matters worse is director Dean Parisot’s noticeable lack of coverage; in some sequences, it’s as if there were shots missing, or maybe the editing was a rush job. This small detail has a noticeable effect on the action, but also on the jokes. If the camera could only linger a little longer on punch lines, their payoffs would get bigger reactions. Instead, the film is in too much of a hurry to appreciate the more subtle and priceless gags.

Mostly, though, the movie has too much going on, especially considering that its core components — Willis and Parker, and Malkovich and Mirren — mix so well together. Why dilute that down? 

I like silly spy capers like this. Red 2 joins a long list semi-serious comedy capers, from North by Northwest to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie version about an unbelievably compatible spy couple brought closer together by their competing espionage gigs. Red 2 reminds me most of True Lies, another movie about a bland woman dating a Bond figure. True Lies is a better movie, and forever in the pantheon of great action extravaganzas, but Red 2 is no slouch in comparison. And it succeeds in exactly the same way True Lies did: it gives its female hero a reason to be heroic and she bravely lives up to the challenge.

 

 

 

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

Deep within a summer of frayed edges and missed connections — Superman destroying Metropolis, Capt. Kirk’s failure to delegate, Iron Man’s panic attacks, Lone Ranger (‘nuff said) — I really had to sit back and admire Pacific Rim’s overt simplicity: it is a movie about giant monster-fighting robots, and that is precisely what it delivers.

No detours, no origin stories, no unnecessary exposition. No fat or gristle, either; just lean strips of robot-carved monster meat. Pacific Rim knows what it’s about and it goes to great lengths to maintain that steadfast course. Even the robots have names, like Gypsy Danger and Crimson Typhoon, as if they’re characters in the film — and they sorta are.

The robots were created after giant skyscraper-sized monsters, called Kaiju, began bubbling up out of a breach deep in the Pacific Ocean. The robots are called Jaegers, German for “hunter,” and they’re controlled by human avatars standing in cockpits inside the robot’s empty skulls. They control a Jaeger (yay-gurr) in tandem with another pilot via a “neural handshake” called a drift; essentially, they’re driving the robot with their linked brains. Two pilots are required because a single brain would get overloaded and likely explode. And those crab fishermen thought their job was dangerous.

I’ve explained to you the general idea, but it only does service to about half the film many charms. The other half is its rich style and deft tone, touchstones to the dark fantasy realm that usually accompanies director Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican visionary behind the Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies. Here, once again, he creates a fantastical world with an uneasy relationship between its tech-savvy humans and its monstrous new residents. It’s not quite as fascinating as the last Hellboy movie — with its eyeball wings, talking tumors and giant seed pods — but it certainly holds its own with its towering Jaegers, the robot jocks who pilot them with brain-hacked Wii devices, and those lizard-like monsters with their radioactive-blue blood and basketball-sized scale lice.

If I had to describe the look of the film in a single word, it would be rivety. Rivets everywhere. Rivets all up and down the Jaegers, rivets inside the deep caverns that serve as the Jaeger bases, rivets all up in the giant walls designed to protect coastal cities from hammerheaded Kaiju. When Bethlehem Steel was liquidated I know where it all went, to the Warner Bros. lot. The abundance of rivets isn’t a complaint, just an observation of Rim’s mechanical gear-punk aesthetic. I liked the look of the film, rivets and all, although I did find the monster design to be a teensy bit lacking. By the end of the film, they all started to look alike aside from a monster that could fly and another with a big rhino horn on its face.

The film stars Charlie Hunnam, that aggro-star from TV’s Sons of Anarchy. He plays Raleigh Becket, a defeated Jaeger pilot 11 years into the Kaiju invasion. His former commander, with the command-worthy name of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), calls on Raleigh to come back to the Jaeger program before its funding is shut down. Raleigh is reluctant to return because he lost his perfect drift companion, his brother, in a Kaiju fight many years before. “Die in a Jaeger or die here on the wall … your choice,” Stacker tells him. Guess where Raleigh goes next.

Back at Jaeger HQ, we meet more characters, including other drifters, a brainy analyst with pilot aspirations (Rinko Kikuchi) and two bumbling scientists with competing theories on the Kaiju’s origins. The scientists provide the comic relief, especially the spastic Newton (Charlie Day), who has a fanboy obsession with the Kaiju. It’s not an outright comedy, but there are several playful sequences that show off the film’s whimsical underbelly, including one with Newton wandering Hong Kong slums looking for Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer in dead Kaiju organs. “I took my name from my favorite conqueror and my second-favorite Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn,” Chau tells Newton. The actor playing Hannibal is a joke in itself, one I will let you discover.

Mostly, though, Pacific Rim is about robots and monsters pummeling each other into pieces. If that sorta thing interests you then you will be very pleased with the rock’em-sock’em nature of the fight scenes, which do drag on and on, but are clever and well choreographed still. The movie does exploit that troublesome issue I’ve been having with popcorn movies’ incessant overuse of post-9/11 imagery, including crumbling buildings and civilians fleeing dust clouds on city streets. Certainly Pacific Rim, which is essentially a tech-heavy Godzilla remake, earns the right to show these shots more than a movie like Star Trek Into Darkness, but it’s still a worrisome trend. Del Toro does make a point to show humans evacuating safely into underground shelters, which leaves the unpopulated city above free for an alien-robot title bout. So it’s not a complete killfest in those toppling skyscrapers.

The effects are nifty, the characters are likeable and have rewarding story payoffs, the action is dizzyingly frantic and well designed, and director Guillermo del Toro proves yet again that he is a capable big-budget storyteller. I enjoyed Pacific Rim probably more than I should. But after so many constipated, overly-complex movies this summer, it makes complete sense that I find stupendous enjoyment out of this, a movie that knows exactly what it is and is never embarrassed to admit it.

Western remake lacks heart, literally

Walt Disney had a clear vision: to make boys and girls happy.

So I found myself appalled — and a wee bit frightened for the Disney culture — in The Lone Ranger when, contrary to the entire history and tone of the Lone Ranger mythology, a villain slowly plunges a knife into a ranger’s belly, reaches up into his quivering guts, removes his heart and eats it in front of him as he chokes to death on his own blood.

I hope that description shocks you. It shocked me and I’ve seen some terrible, terrible violence in movies over the years. But never straight-up cannibalism in a picture made by the House of Mouse, the studio that brought us bottled innocence The Little Mermaid, Tinker Bell and a theme park attraction called Toontown. Not since Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) took her boobs out in S.O.B. has the Disney audience been so cruelly betrayed.

Violence or not, though, The Lone Ranger is a horrible misstep for Disney, which is clearly trying to jumpstart some magic akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The Pirates movies, the good and the stupid ones, always understood their tone; even the grimmer episodes, with squid hearts in treasure chests and Jack Sparrow in the afterlife, had a cheery bounce to their step. Here in The Lone Ranger the action is lifeless, the characters are obscenely flat, and the style and tone ricochet off everything, like buckshot fired into a blacksmith’s shop. It’s as if Disney, with its eternal legacy of great storytelling, had suddenly forgotten how to tell a decent story.

The film makes no promises with its titles. You’d think a movie titled The Lone Ranger would be about the Lone Ranger, the masked cowboy who sets out to save the Old West from cattle rustlers, banditos and silver barons. No, it’s more about Tonto, a Comanche Indian with a dead bird on his head that he feeds corn meal as if it were alive and squawking. A clue to who the real protagonist is can be found in the casting: Tonto is played by Johnny Depp, eternal scene-stealer and movie bandit. The guy can’t make a cameo without getting his name above the title.

Sure enough, Depp, caked in mud and warpaint, has the best lines here — including a great line after his partner says his famous “high ho, Silver” catchphrase — even as the film continuously wanders through very mediocre territory. The whole thing is told from Tonto’s perspective and even uses his unreliable narration from 1933 to embark on a story that takes place in 1869. His audience is a peanut-chomping boy at a Wild West exposition. Depp is in old-man makeup and it’s remarkable how cheap old-man makeup still looks in films.

The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), is the film’s dopey afterthought. He enters the film as a weakling, and maintains that posture for 120 minutes. “This is the first time I’ve fired a gun in nine years,” he tells Tonto during a gunfight. (“Best keep that to yourself, Kemosabe,” Tonto says back.) By the end of the film, though, especially in that mayhem-scorched final 20 minutes, the Lone Ranger suddenly becomes a seasoned pro, galloping his trusty steed Silver through train cars, hurtling off saloon rooftops and winging bad guys from hundreds of feet away. He is the least heroic character until the movie requires him to be the most heroic character, and then he becomes Bruce Willis on overdrive.

The plot involves a mish-mash of western motifs — including a heavy homage to Once Upon A Time in the West — but it mostly boils down to a railroad tycoon who is willing to launch an Indian genocide if it means his trains get to steam right up to silver deposits on Indian land. This stock Old West archetype (played by Tom Wilkinson) uses the deformed monster and heart nibbler Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to whip up an Indian panic scary enough to get the cavalry to show up with sabers rattling.

Between the rail tycoon, Butch and the cavalry captain, these are some bad dudes. First, let me reiterate this: Butch eats a guy’s heart. In a Disney movie! This can’t be repeated enough. Elsewhere, the villains and their henchmen shoot priests, murder a posse of rangers, use a crank-driven Gatling gun to exterminate a tribe of Comanche, they kill two of the movie’s three black characters (one of them is scalped), threaten to rape a woman twice, skulls are crushed in with wooden beams and questionable jokes are made about what is most definitely a gay cowboy. All totaled up, this is one violent and profoundly upsetting Disney movie, one that goes against the very spirit of the brand. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised from a director whose first name is Gore.

These are unforgivable errors on Verbinksi and Disney’s parts, but their impacts would have been lessened if The Lone Ranger were simply better in other departments, but it fails at nearly every aspect. The jokes are either laugh-out-loud funny (Tonto literally kicking a dead horse) or chronically immature (a burping Silver). Many of the sequences are too long and end with little payoff, including one scene at a campfire with vampire bunnies. The entire film lacks any real momentum, and every time it picks up speed the narrative pauses to bounce us back to the 1933 storytelling framework. It’s all simply too long, too slow and often downright boring.

The Long Ranger’s only redemption is its unearned, unjustified finale, which blasts us with Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” the Lone Ranger’s official theme song. It cues up for the last 20 minutes or so, with Tonto and the Lone Ranger bringing their A-game to a rather epic two-train chase through Old West locations. This music and the action it’s set to — even after all the heinous violence this movie tortured me with — lifted my spirits immensely. The Lone Ranger rides Silver atop a moving train, and then in the train, as he shoots through windows and gallops past gunslingers. Tonto has a slapstick bit with a ladder balanced precariously on a train rail. The mood is light and fun, the music is thumping, the action is serious but never gross or violent, the movie is actually accelerating … for this very brief moment, The Lone Ranger finds its groove. If only the whole movie would have been like this.  

I recommend that last sequence, but I can’t in good conscience recommend the two hours that gets you to that point. I especially urge you to think twice before taking your young children.

Imagine that: a Disney movie too violent for your children. Sad stuff.

(So yeah, I didn't like this movie, but check out some of the publicity stills. They're quite good.)