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  1. Culture
6 August 2013updated 14 Sep 2021 3:32pm

Johnny Depp characterising critics as all-powerful movie slayers is pure delusion

With newspapers laying off arts writers, the suggestion The Lone Ranger has been ruined by dishonest reviewers seems paradoxical. Perhaps there are other reasons behind the blockbuster's US flop?

By Ryan Gilbey

Actors Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer and producer Jerry Bruckheimer complained publicly this week that a slew of poor (and, they allege, dishonest) reviews killed their new movie The Lone Ranger on its US release in July. As many commentators were quick to point out on Twitter, this is poppycock. “I blame the studio that couldn’t help the filmmakers locate the fun, less-convoluted 100-minute film that’s struggling to get out,” said Charles Gant, film editor of Heat magazine and the Guardian’s box-office analyst. Jonathan Dean of the Sunday Times observed correctly: “It’s one of [Depp’s] poorer arguments. Critics hated the last THREE Pirates movies and they did so well they’re making another.”

I enjoyed parts of The Lone Ranger, directed by Gore Verbinski (who made the first three Pirates of the Caribbean instalments), but it’s not a massively audience-friendly film. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, with an uncertain tone that veers wildly between slapstick, action-adventure and the outright macabre, it is less like a summer tentpole release than a vaudeville show or a student revue (albeit one on a budget so large that Disney had to step in to halt production and prune the costs). It is absolutely the filmmakers’ right to make the movie they wanted to make, and if the studio is willing to trust them on their judgements, however eccentric, then they are luckier than most in the current straitened climate.

But to then whinge at critics because that big-budget gamble didn’t pay off is somewhat undignified. Hammer even suggested that US critics only came after The Lone Ranger because their attempts to savage another beleaguered production—World War Z, which also suffered off-screen setbacks—were frustrated when that movie went on to become a moderate hit. “This is the deal with American critics: they’ve been gunning for our movie since it was shut down the first time,” the actor said. “That’s when most of the critics wrote their initial reviews… They tried to do the same thing with World War Z. It didn’t work, the movie was successful. Instead they decided to slit the jugular of our movie.”

This idea of critics as serial killers prowling the multiplexes with the smell of blood in their nostrils is simultaneously quaintly amusing and entirely whacko. It bears no relation to reality. A tiny release playing on a handful of screens can be buried by a bad review from an influential writer, or lifted out of obscurity for a few days by a positive one. But a blockbuster rarely dies unless there are extenuating circumstances: if the audience wasn’t put off by the pre-release whiff of perceived trouble on The Lone Ranger, perhaps the picture fell foul of the curse of the western, an especially difficult genre to market to modern audiences. So far the film has taken $175m on a $215m budget—bad news indeed. It’s too early to say what its total gross will be but from the outside it resembles the Will Smith flop Wild Wild West all over again (old TV show adaptation lacking any modern-day currency of familiarity; major box-office star; western theme). That took $222m on a $170m budget, another poor result.

Contrary to what Depp and his compadres believe, the critical fraternity is in a more vulnerable position than ever. In the past few years, the Village Voice disgraced itself by sacking some of the finest film writers in the US—including J. Hoberman and Dennis Lim—while here in the UK the latest cull was at the Independent on Sunday, which has exhibited the grossest philistinism in cutting loose its entire team of arts critics from September. I haven’t read the Village Voice since Hoberman was pushed, and I can’t think of a reason to buy a national newspaper like the IoS when it places such paltry value on brilliant and informed critical writing. But the situation is hardly helped by wealthy and powerful Hollywood titans suggesting that any bad reviews must be motivated by spite, collusion or conspiracy. The same critics, presumably, who gave rave reviews to earlier Verbinski comedies like the hugely inventive Mousehunt and Rango, or who praised Depp’s idiosyncratic turns in the Pirates movies. Or were those different, cuddlier critics?

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The Lone Ranger is released on Friday.

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