The Lone Ranger rides again … and it’s fun!

“In the early days of the western United States, a masked man and an Indian rode the plains, searching for truth and justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”

And so began the radio adventures of The Lone Ranger. But how exactly did the masked man become a hero to young boys across the land? Disney’s new version of The Lone Ranger aims to tell that story, and it sticks fairly close to the origin set forth on the radio show from long ago.

As John Reid is returning to his home town, the train he’s on is ambushed by bandits on a mission to set their leader, Butch Cavendish, free before he’s brought to justice. Reid encounters another prisoner, the Indian Tonto, but after a spectacular train derailment they go their separate ways. Knowing Cavendish is at large, Reid’s brother Dan deputizes him as a Texas Ranger and they set out to find Cavendish and his men. Unfortunately, the Rangers are ambushed and left for dead. Tonto discovers the bodies, buries them but is surprised to find John still alive. He creates a mask for Reid so that he can remain incognito while they team up to bring Cavendish and his men to justice, but other forces may be at play, with much bigger fish to fry than Cavendish.

This is the basic plot of The Lone Ranger, and in fact was the basic plot of the original radio serial. Where the film goes off the rails a bit is with the addition of much more extraneous plot details — railroads, silver mines — that become a bit overwhelming at times. You can definitely see the fingerprints of Pirates of the Caribbean scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who seem to have been brought on to beef up Justin Haythe’s original screenplay) and director Gore Verbinsky all over this movie. I didn’t really have a hard time following the story, even with the twist, but some pieces of it could have been jettisoned (like Helena Bonham Carter’s character, and the unnecessary love triangle between the Reid brothers and Dan’s wife).

Those minor quibbles aside, The Lone Ranger ended up being great fun. I know the knives are out for this one simply because it took forever to get filmed, but I totally enjoyed it from beginning to end. The film, however, is really misleading with its title because Johnny Depp’s Tonto takes the stage, front and center. In fact, the entire story is being told as a flashback by a very, very old Tonto (Depp in some amazing old age makeup), and by the end you’re not quite sure if the Lone Ranger actually exists or if this whole thing is a tall tale.

The film is also a little schizophrenic with shifts in tone from campy comedy to serious Western, with most of the comedy coming from Depp, so it’s almost a little off-putting when you have these serious moments of characters being gunned down in cold blood followed by a sly glance or snarky comment from Tonto. But where the movie succeeds is in its casting of Armie Hammer as the iconic all-American hero. He does straight-laced and stalwart to perfection, he’s got those boy-next-door good looks and he just seems like an all around good guy. Depp, however, seems to be playing just a variation on Captain Jack Sparrow, and he even strikes a very Sparrow-ish pose at one point. It’s not a bad performance, but he just seems to be in a completely different movie at times.

Rounding out the cast are Ruth Wilson as one point of the love triangle, an almost unrecognizable William Fichtner as Cavendish, Tom Wilkinson as the railroad baron who believes trains will help conquer America, and James Badge Dale as Dan Reid. Two of the biggest stars in the movie aren’t actors, but the locomotives built specifically for the film, running on six miles of track laid down in Arizona. The use of real trains instead of CGI creations helps give the film a more grounded-in-reality feel … and they just look awesome!

So is The Lone Ranger a great film? No, not really. It has a heck of a lot of problems, especially in not knowing what it wants to be. But the cast, the terrific production design, the action scenes and even the music — and you can’t help but really get drawn in the moment that legendary theme music kicks in — makes The Lone Ranger an entertaining, summer thrill ride. Wonder how long before we see an actual thrill ride at a Disney park?