It was an ugly, mean-spirited, off-kilter note in a film that was from end to end, cruel and unbalanced -- but it was also mystifying. Why change the traditional interpretation? Which as the original author's son explained, was inspired by an Anglicized version of a Native American word from where his father grew up, and which makes etymological sense as a derivation from an Ojibway word for "seeker," i.e., a scout.
Certainly not in the name of authenticity -- no, it fits purely as a dramatic element, in the new, "gritty" rendering of the Lone Ranger's origin story (because every superhero story today must be an origin story, whether it needs it or not) wherein the two heroes are not fast friends from their first meeting, but deeply-unkindred souls literally shackled together like something out of an old movie about convicts being forced to learn to work together -- nobody ever said that Verbinski and Depp brought anything new to the Western genre, only to the Lone Ranger.
So it is a hurtful and insulting moniker, bestowed on a clueless oaf by another clueless oaf, to rub salt in the wound of having lost a sibling and survived by pure chance. In the context of the revised "grimdark" backstory it makes a certain amount of sense, but there seems to be no sense in the whole idea of reinventing the two iconic heroes of the Fantastic West as blundering clowns who only luck into their victories (with the help of a magic flying horse, no less) and who dislike and injure each other at every turn, in a way that would have Stan and Ollie looking on in sheer disbelief!
But one thing which has been pointed out by many a critic and hapless viewer of the 2013 Lone Ranger is how much it feels like a pallid imitation of Pirates of the Caribbean -- which is perfectly fair, as that is simply how it was advertised in the trailers, a film by the makers of POTC and featuring the star of that series--
But Pirates worked, for so long and so far as it did work, by being an ensemble cast wherein we were supposed to root for multiple main characters, even when they were working at cross-purposes. Will and Jack and Elizabeth were all the heroes of the story, along with their various roguish friends and frenemies, and when the series forgot that, it fell apart.
The enmity-to-brotherhood relationship between Will and Jack worked because first of all, Will was gormless but competent at his chosen trade, naive but engaging in his good-heartedness, and resourseful for all his naivete -- and second of all, it worked because despite his circumstances, Jack never displayed any malice towards Will. We were rooting for them to overcome that barrier of misunderstanding and become friends from the start -- it was a bromance before the word was even coined. When they had to work together to save the day -- and work with Elizabeth, undamseled by the cleverness of the first film's narrative -- we laughed, and cheered, and hoped it would all work out in the end.
So, instead, we get a gormeless-and-incompetent
It's as though they looked at Curse of the Black Pearl, asked themselves how could they stripmine it for anything else that they hadn't already wasted in the sequels, and found a few stray nuggets of Narrativium left behind -- and promptly boiled off every last bit of potential to render a bleak grey slag, instead of true silver.
Why they chose to do it this way, why they chose to travesty a beloved -- if dusty -- intellectual property in a way that was clearly guaranteed to alienate all fans of the original while failing to garner any new ones, just as the prior inept adaptation in 1981 -- also mean-spirited and contemptuous of the original story, and the very idea of idealistic heroism -- flopped hard and fast.
(Legend of the Lone Ranger preemptively killed the career of its headlining star, by-the-by -- and was also a cynical attempt to take advantage of audience trends in the wake of Christopher Reeves' Superman. It was moreover subsequently described by some of its own makers as "too violent for little kids" but not sophisticated enough for an adult audience, which makes it doubly prescient an omen for the 2013 reenactment's erratic tone.)
But no one railroaded Johnny Depp into taking a lead role in this new retelling, a powerless newbie forced into a famous mold only to be tossed aside when it didn't work out, he was an important part of the process from the moment that Disney took it on -- and, as it happens, he was equally if not more so, responsible for his latest box-office fiasco Mortdecai, another "revival" of an older, mostly-forgotten property that has its passionate fans...who, surprise, surprise, equally loathe what's been done with the original it was based on.
According to The Week's breakdown of What Went Wrong, Johnny Depp was introduced to the works of Kyril Bonfiglioli while filming the first Pirates movie, and self-reportedly was entranced by them. (Perhaps he truly was: we all have had the experience of realizing that someone else is a fan of the same works as we, but for entirely opposite reasons, and that we have somehow managed to read or watch the same thing but experience something quite different.) So he spent ten years trying to bring the stories to the big screen, and Mortdecai, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating that is currently fluctuating between 11 and 12%, was the result.
Now, other than the fact that they both share main characters (and plots!) subordinated to silly costumes and ridiculously-affected accents, leading to them both sharing disappointed audiences and abysmal reviews, nobody has heretofore suggested that there is anything else in common. Lone Ranger and Mortdecai have different screenwriters, different directors, different photographers, different score composers, different genres -- they only share a lead actor, on the surface.
On another level, they're both heist movies with a "political thriller" subtext, however ineptly rendered in either of them -- in Lone Ranger it's a silver mine used to buy a railroad network as the key to political power in a nation rapidly rising on the world stage that is the Macguffin, in Mortdecai it is a not-only-fictional but historically-impossible version of the Clothed Maja to be sold to fund an unspecific international criminal organization trying to start a "worldwide revolution" in some ill-defined way.
But a deeply obscure, practically-backstage connection may exist, because according to recent articles about the original novels that inspired (more or less) Mortdecai which encourage the unfamiliar to give them a try -- a possibly-intended byproduct of the endeavor, although I would be more likely to think so if Depp and David Koepp had spent any significant time promoting or even mentioning Bonfiglioli in the trailers or other media prior to its release, and I am certain they never intended for reviewers to admonish readers not to dismiss the books on the grounds of the wretchedness of the film adaptation! -- according to the biographical information on the author, Kyril Bonfiglioli survived, by sheer random accident and the disobedience of childhood, a German bomb that killed his mother and brother in the very shelter where they had taken refuge.
And ever after, according to his ex-wife and biographer, he suffered from survivor's guilt, and believed that "the wrong brother" had survived, which certainly contributed to the self-destructive behaviour that led him to die comparatively young from alcohol abuse.
I am not at all sure that it is a mere coincidence, that Johnny Depp pushed and pushed to make a movie in which he plays the fictional alter-ego of the man who considered himself the wrong brother, directly after he called another man "Wrong Brother" in an otherwise-inexplicable narrative choice, connected with a series in which he plays a man who serially betrays another who has formed a fraternal bond, in a "band of brothers" shipboard setting!
What it means is another thing, and one I barely have any guesses towards, as yet. But it is a strange pattern, to be sure!
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