Wounds

Bugs ‘N’ Kisses

Wounds
Directed by Babak Anvari 2019 UK
London Film Festival 2019 screening Saturday 5th October

For my third film of this year’s London Film Festival, I saw Wounds, which is the second feature length film by the Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari, known for his previous movie Under The Shadow (which I kinda raved about here). The film is written by the director and based on the novella The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud. It’s also, like his first feature, a horror movie. In the question and answer session after this screening, Anvari said that it was purely an accident that he returned to this genre as he wanted to demonstrate some kind of proficiency with various different kinds of movie genres before returning to horror but, after he was fed a copy of the novella on which this is based, he realised he was so in tune with it and the author (unknown to him at the time but now a good friend) that he had to do this one.

And... I have to say that, although it lands in the same genre as the last one, it really isn’t that much like his debut feature. Similarities would include things like some lovely shot compositions and, as his first film, the sound design plays an important role (yeah, I’ll get to my embarrassment about the sound design later). At a stretch, I’d say another common feature is that it’s starts off as a slow burn before the director ratchets up the intensity... although, in a way, that could be said of a lot of movies.

One main difference, though, apart from this not being a ghost story but more a ‘demonic possession/body horror’ tale, is that he has some real 'A list' Hollywood talent. The film stars Armie Hammer as main protagonist Will, who shows just how intense and edgy he can play here... along with Dakota Johnson as his girlfriend Carrie and the wonderful Zazie Beetz (who I loved in Deadpool 2, reviewed here) as former girlfriend Alicia. All the cast are particular good in this but a new level of respect to these three for being brave enough to see this one through.

Will is a college drop out and one of the main, much loved bartenders at his local pub in New Orleans and the majority of the action of film, with a few notable exceptions, is set either in the bar or in the apartment he shares with Carrie. It was the director’s intent, as he made clear in the Q&A after the film had finished, that he was trying to make a film which started off and looked like one of those 80s relationship movies like Reality Bites, to suck the viewer in before going full horror. He also mentioned, among many influences name checked, his love of the films of David Cronenberg... so you can see exactly how someone like him can arrive at what is a fairly intense and somewhat technologically aware adaptation like this.

I say technologically aware because the peculiar brand of demonic witchcraft gone wrong, if that’s what it is, is passed on by means of a mobile phone left in the bar by some college kids who leave when a fight breaks out. When Will forgets he put the phone in his pocket and takes it home, he starts seeing some strange messages pop up. Using some not too hard to figure out detective work to quickly crack the password in the space of about thirty seconds, he then starts answering some of the texts and it’s not too long before some nasty images start to appear along with all manner of things which threaten the fabric of his and his girlfriends reality... there’s a lovely scene where he comes home and finds her staring into a slow moving portal displayed on her laptop and it takes him putting her into a bath to wake her from her bizarre coma (and that’s not all that happens in that scene but I won’t tell you what happens when he puts her in the bath).

One of the things the director does nicely... and I think it’s this more than anything else in the movie that could be said to be a partial homage to the modus operandi of Cronenberg, is to blur the lines for the audience about the sanity of their main protagonist (that being said, there's a possible armpit growth happening too... flashes of Rabid, reviewed here). He uses little flashes of things like the severed heads of Will’s friends, which Will obviously sees as well as the audience, to start planting doubt in the viewers mind. The director referenced Nicholas Roeg in relation to these moments when he talked to the audience after the movie but in some ways they’re a slightly different kind of association... although, to be fair, since we don’t know how the character of Will progresses after ‘the incident’ which is the final shot of the movie (yeah, like I’m going to tell you what that is here), they could be very much in keeping with Roeg’s flash forward/flash back visions of the history of his characters so, yeah, maybe that was this director’s intent with those almost subliminal moments all along.

Asides from having a good script and some great actors in it, I mentioned the shot designs earlier. This guy likes his verticals and he hasn’t abandoned them here. I’d really need to watch this again to unravel what I was seeing but one of the things I really liked was a shot fairly late in the movie where Will is breaking into his girlfriend’s computer and there is one of those classic fans on the desk. There’s a cool moment where we see Will’s head, with the fan taking up the visual space in front of half his head but, because the blades are moving so fast, we don’t see them at all, just Will’s face. I’m guessing that must have been a hard thing to capture what with film speeds and not getting some kind of motion clash but it made for a nice shot and one wonders if it was some kind of metaphor for the way the character is, quite possibly, becoming immersed in something... evil.

There are also a lot of bugs.

Cockroaches, in fact. These are definitely both a metaphor and an indication in the movie that something bad is coming... they seem to have a homing instinct and are drawn to things which have become ‘demonically touched’ and, according to the director, they were a real pain to work with. There’s a beautiful rendered moment when Will first presses ‘play’ on a video which arrives on the phone which involves the cockroaches attracted to a severed head/skull and, the end moment of this video, where the film takes the first real turn into giving you a sense of the supernatural at work, is a really nicely executed shock idea. I’m sure it’s been done before but not necessarily in this medium and it’s certainly effective here. Again, though, I’m trying to keep this review spoiler free so... go see it yourself, I understand it’s getting a release in a couple of weeks though, sadly, only on the internet and not in a proper cinema or home video release (as yet... what is wrong with this country?).

The other thing in this is the sound design and the... ahem... score. Like his first feature, Anvari uses a powerful blend of soundscapes that help the film along. There’s a nice moment, for instance, where Will is slowly swiping through the phone and, each time he swipes, it’s echoed within the sound design. As I was watching this I found myself desperately hoping for a CD release of the score so I could hear the lovely atonalism of the music better. Imagine my surprise then when, in the Q&A, the director said something along the lines of... “obviously, there was no musical score in the movie, just sound design we created...” So, yeah, I guess nothing was actually ‘composed’ for the movie and that just shows how I’ve become used to modern horror movie music, which a lot of the time tends to sound like this stuff anyway. Oh well. I say this owning an old vinyl copy of the non-musical ‘soundtrack’ of Eraserhead so, yeah, I don’t have that special kind of tunnel vision which says music has to include melody, rhythm and harmony like a lot of people do, I guess.

Still, despite the lack of music, Wounds works a treat and the ending is nicely done. Alas, I wish this was getting a cinematic or Blu Ray release so I could take another look at it but, either way, this film is another strong recommendation from me and something I think will appeal to most fans of horror films. Like The Antenna, which I saw at the London Film Festival the night before (my review of that one is here), this would have done really well at FrightFest this year, although the audience would probably have been a little smaller, I would imagine. Definitely one to watch out for.

Free Fire

Shooting Stars

Free Fire
UK 2016
Directed by Ben Wheatley
UK cinema release print.

I usually find the films of Ben Wheatley... who along with co-writer Amy Jump has, perhaps unwittingly, become one of the most shining auteurs representing British cinema these days... well... usually a bit hit or miss. I’ve only seen four of his six cinematic features (and not a great deal of his TV work... only his Doctor Who episodes) and of those four, I loved the first two I saw... Kill List (reviewed here) and Sightseers (reviewed here)... but really didn’t rate High Rise (reviewed here) when I saw it at the London Film Festival back in 2015. So I approached his new film, Free Fire, with a certain amount of caution. Not least because the trailer didn’t really appeal to me all that much.

It does, however, have a lot of big name stars shooting at each other in this film... such as Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Noah Taylor and Michael Smiley... which is to be expected with this directors growing status in international cinema. People are going to want to work with him.

 It would be true to say that on the level of the acting talent in this film, nobody does a bad job here. They all make believable characters and a certain sense of heightened, dramatic ‘realism’ is manufactured to serve the threads of black humour running through the piece. It’s a film that will pull you into an immersive experience in a very short time. That being said, although it’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than High Rise (for me at least), it was nowhere near the dizzying heights of the other two movies I mentioned in the opening paragraph. That being said, it’s an interesting experiment of a film in its premise and execution and, if it was for nothing other than that, then it’s to be applauded for going full on into the very limiting territory which the writers and director have chosen to explore here.

The film tells the story of an arms deal that goes sour and, apart from maybe the first ten minutes of the movie, it’s all set in an abandoned/disused factory/warehouse kind of environment. Now, the thing I didn’t realise until finding out the day after I saw it is that it’s set in Boston in 1978. The film is all shot in Wheatley’s home town of Brighton, UK,  which is not all that much of a surprise actually, since the only external locations are a moving vehicle at night and a place just outside of the warehouse. No, what surprised the heck out of me after having already seen this is the fact that this movie is actually set in the 1970s.

Nothing about the style of dress or haircuts or anything else in this movie screamed 1970s at me and, I suspect, that this failure or inability on my part to register that it’s set in a historical time period, albeit one I grew up in, is endemic to me rather than anyone else. A fair few times in my life I have been called Mr. 70s by people who have never met each other at different periods of my life and so, I can only assume I have a blind spot when it comes to recent time periods I’ve lived through. That being said, it makes a little more sense now as to why people in the movie risk life and limb to get to the only phone in the place rather than whip out a mobile... which I never even thought of while I was watching. The phone design should have perhaps given it away but, in my minds eye, all people’s telephones still look like that so I didn’t make the association. I think dial phones should make a big comeback, to be honest. Of course, if any of the characters did have a mobile phone on them then the ‘experiment’ could not have worked in the same controlled environment that this movie has in the same way... so it’s obvious why Mr. Wheatley chose this period for this film. After all, can you imagine how something like the original Die Hard (reviewed here) might have played out if John McLane had a mobile phone on him?

The film is about, as I said, a gun deal that goes sour between the two parties buying and selling the guns and, right from the outset when the various people meet, Mr. Wheatley raises the tension by having them not get on very well at all. Far from it, in fact. Everything feels dangerous and the audience is left waiting for the one trigger that blows the gasket of the less than smooth running engine of this particular arms deal and causes everything to go wrong. It turns out that the back breaking camel’s straw is an incident that occurs off screen and which affected two of the characters from the night before this event takes place but, once these two characters, one from either of the side of the deal, both recognise each other... that’s when everything goes, as people say these days, pear shaped.

But it’s to the credit of Mr. Wheatley, Ms Jump and the cast of the film that the audience is already placed in a position where everything seems like a powder keg waiting to go off anyway. The characters do not like being around each other and they act, for the most part, like people who don’t expect an arms deal could go sour. So rather than go in polite, they spend a lot of their time trading insults with the ‘opposition’ and generally getting on each other’s nerves... not a great start to an equitable trade solution, to be sure.

The film, once the inevitable happens, becomes a movie comprising of all the cast members insulting and shooting at each other and just trying to find a way to survive the evening and get out of the environment they all find themselves trapped in. Nobody escapes a bullet and the characters are continually shot up and find themselves getting more damaged as the evening wears on. Everybody just wants to shoot everyone else and get themselves to a hospital... not to mention the presence of two snipers in the warehouse, who are an unexpected element to the majority of the characters (don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler... you’ll find that one out very early on in the proceedings).

All in all the film is noisy and has some nice moments in terms of dialogue but, for me and probably only for me, the film seemed less able to grab me than it may most people, I suspect. Anyone who knows me knows that I dislike gangland based or criminal POV films and, like most other films featuring these types of characters, I didn’t find one redeeming feature in pretty much anyone here. So that kinda takes the punch out of it for me because, once the shooting starts, I didn’t really mind who got shot and who made it out of the film alive. Horror films about bratty teenagers tend to throw up the same problem for me so... yeah, for the most part, if I don’t feel like I could spend an hour of pub time with a character then I’m probably not going to care what happens to that person.

It is, however, a fascinating film to watch on a technical level and Wheatley manages to get some nice shot set ups with various planes of space slicing up the screen in some places. There’s also a nice ‘John Denver’ moment too but, you know, I don’t want to get into pseudo-spoiler territory here. It must have been a nightmare to film in some ways... but probably a lot easier in others. I’ve absolutely no idea if this is the case but it struck me very early on that... with the amount of damage that both the characters and, perhaps more importantly, the set/environment they are inhabiting is taking... this thing must have been, surely, shot in sequence (apart from maybe the first ten minutes of the movie). Otherwise it would have been a complete nightmare with rebuilds to already damaged sections of the set and, believe me, the warehouse takes a lot of damage as the film progresses. I wouldn’t be surprised, too, if all of the actors would have all been on the set more or less simultaneously for about 90% of the time... so it must have made for a pretty interesting shoot. I’m guessing, of course, but I really can’t see how it could have been done any other way.

Ultimately, Free Fire is not really my cup of tea but I don’t think that’s going to be the case for most audience members and I think this will go on to become a well loved movie. I think history will treat this kindly and I think, although I would probably never watch this again myself, that I would recommend this film to a fair amount of people as I genuinely think most of them would enjoy it far more than I did. So there you go... catch it while it’s at the cinema because it’s all about guns and noise and shouting and you need the nice speakers for that.  And, yes... I am now back on track in terms of waiting to see what this director does next. He’s a bit hard to predict and that can only be a good thing.

The Man From UNCLE

A Few Of My Waverly Things

The Man From UNCLE
2015 USA
Directed by Guy Ritchie
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm... okay, so this is one of those films that make reviewing these things both interesting and, frankly, extremely frustrating. I saw the trailers for this and the tone looked somehow wrong and, well... it certainly is but there’s a lot of good stuff here too.

I used to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E as a kid on TV, mostly in the many movie incarnations... some of which were just edited versions of compiled episodes and others which were original stories (if memory serves me correctly). It’s been a long time since I saw any of those projected onto a big screen... I think I saw one or two around about the early to late seventies, on screenings at holiday camps etc when I was a kid. I remember the biggest factors in me getting into these things, as it always seemed to be, were the musical scores on these. Although the original The Man From UNCLE theme by Jerry Goldsmith is what most purists will probably cite as the best, I personally prefer the reworkings and scores by other composers such as Gerald Fried and Richard Shores... once the unusual time signature of maestro Jerry’s had been changed to something more usual (which I really don’t mind in this particular instance... not nearly as much as the original composer did) and made more typically jazzier. I used to hum this stuff all the time as a kid.

Now I don’t know much about Guy Ritchie but I saw his excellent Sherlock Holmes film and his not that bad but, not great, sequel to it some years ago. I can see that he’s a great talent and has some nice, possibly even innovative stuff, going on in his films. As such, I was expecting at least a half watchable movie from this and The Man From UNCLE is certainly more than that. However, the film at no time seems like either and extension or a reboot which is faithful in any way, shape or form to the original series or movies... and it really seems to make no attempt to be that, it has to be said.

For me, the movie needed to have at least two things in it besides characters who were like the originals... that was a variation of the original Jerry Goldsmith melody line plus baseline to give it a musical identity and, of course, those signature scene changes which sent the camera fast panning off to the left or right with a jumble of “incomprehensible to the eye” image movement which snapped you into the next location. I thought that the studio would at least retain these things but, alas, it really didn’t and I think this hurts the film tremendously in terms of being an addition to The Man From UNCLE universe.

As far as the characters are concerned, the movie puts too much history into the characters and this means they have been severely changed from their earlier counterparts. Bond author Ian Fleming originally created the Napoleon Solo character for TV before being pulled off of the project due to contractual conflicts with the Bond series of films (again, if my memory serves me correctly). However, the character name, at least, made it into the book of Goldfinger (and the movie version, reviewed here, although in the film he’s just referred to as Solo), so that’s kind of interesting in terms of development times. The character name was used in the book five years before the show aired so I’m not sure if that was a long development time or just a case of Fleming using an old name he liked... he also contributed the character April Dancer, who would later be played by Stefanie Powers in the TV show The Girl From UNCLE. 

In this updated version, Solo has somehow become an ex-thief and Ilya Kuryakin is a big gorilla of a Russian who suffers from psychotic episodes. This is a far cry from the original characters and it really puts the final nail in the coffin as far as continuity with the originals goes.

That being said, Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer are both absolutely great playing this movie’s versions of Solo and Kuryakin... the audience just has to accept they are playing different characters. They are ably supported by Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki playing both ally and villain in this although, it has to be said that Debicki seems a little underused as the main antagonist. One wonders if there was a much larger film, much of which was left on the cutting room floor for this one. Certainly the visual absence of a pay off scene involving Kuryakin and Count Lippi, in a nice reference to Ian Fleming’s Count Lippe character in Thunderball (reviewed here) and the use of montages which promise larger action sequences than were revealed, perhaps, may indicate that this movie has been heavily trimmed... probably by the director I should imagine. All that being said, the film is a joy to watch once you can get over the fact that the only character who is remotely like his original source is Hugh Grant channeling a younger version of Leo G. Carrol’s Mr. Waverly character.

The film is set in the 1960s and that’s certainly good. The director seems to enjoy playing with a kind of hyper real version of the sixties which is not a million miles away from the style employed through various espionage films over the years... just not really The Man From UNCLE franchise. One of the things he does is employ split screen techniques such as those popularised in movies like the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair and he has a great slant on this at the end of the first sequence he does in this manner, where the vertical split from two separate, parallel displayed shots is pulled away revealing that you are actually seeing a single shot which is split by a vertical in the composition already. He does this less successfully later in the movie but the first time he does that here it’s a nice little reveal.

Another interesting thing he does is to take the old horror cliché of having something important happening in the background of a shot which the main characters are unaware of, the audience witnessing what’s going on before the characters realise it. He uses it for comic effect and, certainly, the first time he does this it works quite well. However, I have to say that it becomes something of a signature flourish throughout the film and, by the third time he relies on this technique, I was getting a little tired of it, to be completely truthful.

However, asides from all these little moans, it’s actually a great little 1960s style homage movie with bright colours, nice dialogue, great performances and a very freestyle shooting methodology - Ritchie seems to use every kind of different camera move and trick in the book and it’s really to his credit, and the editor’s, that he manages to make it all work so well without ever once jarring the viewer. There is a certain positive chemistry between all the lead actors and actresses too, which really helps the film, even though these are not the characters you are familiar with from the original show.

Daniel Pemberton’s percussion heavy score is the icing on the cake. Ritchie uses a number of songs, many of them put to surprisingly good use on the soundtrack, but Pemberton’s sixties style spy score is absolutely brilliant and this soundtrack was an instant purchase for me on CD. My one regret, as I stated earlier, was that the powers that be had decided not to use the original theme tune, which would have greatly lifted the movie more into UNCLE territory and I would have really liked to have heard what Pemberton would have come up with  for this. I was already a fan of his score for The Awakening (movie reviewed here) and it was a blast to hear him having the opportunity to do something this flamboyant in a modern film score... hopefully he will become a bit more well known in the industry after this because, Goldsmith cues or not, it’s a pretty cool score.

And that’s about all I have to say about The Man From UNCLE: The Guy Ritchie Affair. It’s not the best version of the source material it could have been. In fact, it couldn’t be much further from it even if the director had tried to update it chronologically to modern times. However, it is a great little gem of a movie and if you are not someone going in with any expectations that it needs to live up to the original, then you should have a lot of fun with it. Like the 1960s Modesty Blaise movie, this film is an absolutely appalling adaptation... but it’s a really fun film. Go see it.

The Lone Ranger

Hard Mask-Tasker

The Lone Ranger
2012 USA
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Playing at UK cinemas now.

The Lone Ranger started out his life in a radio series in 1933. He then rode into novels and a couple of serials (now sadly lost, at least in their original serial format) and then the famous Clayton Moore TV show... followed by a few mis-fires of movies along the way. The latest mis-fire of a movie is by Gore Verbinski and it’s simply called... The Lone Ranger.

I wasn’t the biggest Lone Ranger fan as a kid, but I did quite like watching episodes of that old Clayton Moore show and I also had those brilliant Lone Ranger action men which weren’t quite as big as a regular action man but were certainly about 10 inches tall. They even had a flexible grip on them to hold their six shooters if memory serves me correctly. For the record, I had the three basic figures they released... The Lone Ranger, Tonto and Bush Cavendish. I didn’t have Silver... that would have been too extravagant. Bush Cavendish was, of course, modelled after the actor who played him in multiple episodes in the TV show, Glenn Strange, who had played the Frankenstein monster for Universal three times in House Of Frankenstein, House Of Dracula and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I didn’t know that as a kid though and I was probably unlikely to make the connection... my Frankenstein monster action figure was firmly modelled on the Karloff portrayal so there was really no resemblance between that and my Butch Cavendish toy.

Most people seem to forget the lineage of The Lone Ranger character in terms of his relationship with another radio, film and TV sensation who was created by the same writers... The Green Hornet. Because of rights issues with various companies exploiting the two properties, it’s rarely if ever referenced except on the Radio shows but The Lone Ranger’s secret identity is John Reid and he is the great uncle of Britt Reid. It’s the silver mine that The Lone Ranger uses to make his silver bullets from that ensures the wealth of Britt Reid’s family in The Green Hornet but, like I said, it’s more of a family secret now due to legal obstructions.

Now I’m not the biggest Gore Verbinski fan, I have to say. I loved the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie but that was about it. I think they all went downhill from there and you can see how unmoved I was by Rango right here. The Lone Ranger is a film that has had really bad word of mouth and is being hailed as this year’s John Carter in terms of the capacity to lose money... although I have to say that, asides from a few problems I had with the writing of the titular character in John Carter and the penchant to give a rational scientific spin to the supernatural aspect of the main protagonist finding himself a stranger in a strange land, I actually thought quite a lot of that particular movie. So I wasn’t completely convinced by the bad word of mouth on The Lone Ranger and just see it as a symptom of the lack of willingness in modern audiences to embrace the old fashioned pulp heroes that I love. So I went in with a fairly open mind I have to say and the early signs, once the film began to play out the first few scenes, were encouraging.

Yeah, that’s right. The new version of The Lone Ranger has a perfect set up. An unexpected time period setting with an elderly Tonto to relate the story of the film to a young masked boy in a cowboy suit, followed by the collision of the two main characters in a heady action sequence which immediately brings their chemistry out and makes for some thrilling and humorous watching. Unfortunately, and quite surprisingly after this strong an opening, I have to say, the film begins to falter and spiral down the more it plays out after this initial set up.

It doesn’t immediately fizzle and the characters are written and played with a certain amount of wit, which certainly keeps things bobbing along (just to confirm, Johnny Depp is excellent as always), it just doesn’t really seem to pick up the pace for any great length of time as things continue and there’s very little action to speak of in the rest of the movie until you get to the end sequence. It doesn’t get boring exactly... it just gets, kinda, less than it could have been as opposed to ones expectations... or mine at any rate. Which is a shame, really. I think a few more action scenes, or at least extensions to the smattering of “almost but not quite going for it” action throughout the rest of the movie (up until the end sequence, which it gets back to its hell bent for leather pacing) would have served to punctuate the movie with more emotional investment in the characters and might have made it a great film.

As it is, it doesn’t quite make good, let alone great. And that’s not what I was hoping to be writing today.

On the other hand, it is full of some great things. Armie Hammer’s portrayal of the title character is, perhaps, written a little too pure for an adult but he does it well and Depp has a ball with Tonto and, helpfully, the two actors bounce off each other well. Ditto to William Fichtner’s turn as a rather more disturbing Butch Cavendish than I remember and more shout outs for Tom Wilkinson and Helena Bonham Carter, who is maybe a bit larger than life in the role of the madam of a brothel but certainly fits the mood and shines whenever her and her “special leg” are on screen. Extra special praise to Ruth Wilson as Rebecca Reid, who actually manages to add a real touch of down-to-earth emotion to her character in direct contrast to the hammy but enjoyable theatrics around her, without clashing with the style of the picture. I was really impressed with her in this and next to Johnny Depp, she was the best thing in it.

At least in acting terms. The rolling western scenery and beautiful cinematography also get a big hug from me. Many references to locations used by Sergio Leone (which I’m sure were probably all postmodern references to John Ford anyway) are included which provide the... “that was where Harmonica in Once Upon A Time In The West was made to...” moments in the movie. There are a fair few of these.

The score is fantastic in many ways, too. I find Zimmer a bit hit and miss still but I have preferred his last five years or so to most anything in his earlier back catalogue. I did get annoyed at the obvious references to the Leone film I just mentioned, though. In the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie there’s a cue called Parlay, and it’s a dead rip off in structure and orchestration to The Grand Massacre scene from Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West score... well there’s nothing quite so drastic in The Lone Ranger but there is certainly a lot of music which takes its tone from this cue and it did keep popping me out of the movie at frequent intervals, I have to say. However, it’s a great score and though Zimmer hits you with The Lone Ranger’s key signature music, The William Tell Overture by Rossini, which has been accompanying the character in most of his adventures starting with his original radio appearances, he only plays it for a minute or two near the start of the movie. What he does is cleverly hold back on galloping into the full overture until the spectacular end action sequence, where he plays it to death and throws his own variations in on it too in a stunning, musical tour de force which should make the hair of most fans of this well worn character stand on end.

What the music can’t do, unfortunately, is make the final train chase sequence make more sense when it’s all edited together. I just got lost very quickly and found it harder to follow than I was comfortable with. I think it’s because the sequence is a little more complex than usual as opposed to bad editing. Which is a shame because the music really whipped up the mood for this final hoorah of the movie.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say at this stage, I think. The Lone Ranger is not a terrible movie and I liked bits of it so much that I’ll probably grab the BluRay of this when it hits the sales for a repeat watch. If you are into westerns, and this character especially, then you will probably want to see this take on it. It brings some nice originality to certain parts of “the legend” that are interesting tweaks.

If you’re going for Johnny Depp... he, too, is a good reason to see this. His turn as the older version of Tonto was so good it took me a while to even work out it was him... although the younger version of him seen in the majority of the movie is definitely easy to spot as Depp and, dare I say it, there are definitely some sly nods to his Jack Sparrow persona in a couple of sequences.

If, on the other hand, you’re not a fan of westerns and don’t know your Lone Ranger from... well... from your Green Hornet, then this is probably not going to be a good movie for you. It does lack a certain oomph in some places and even with some decidedly vicious, cannibalistic bunnies and a certain uneasy lack of balance about whether it’s trying to be a family film or something more horrific, it probably won’t do much for you. A sequel might be a nice idea but I suspect it stands little chance of getting one now. Oh well. Hey ho, Silver.