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The Lone Ranger | 2013 | PG-13 | - 3.7.3

A Comanche warrior (Johnny Depp) narrates the stories of how a Texas Ranger (Armie Hammer) became a masked avenger called the Lone Ranger. The two men of diverse cultures learn to cooperate in order to fight greed and corruption in the Old West. Also with Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner, Barry Pepper, Ruth Wilson, James Badge Dale and Helena Bonham Carter. Directed by Gore Verbinski. [2:29]

SEX/NUDITY 3 - A handbill advertises a place called "Red's," which we learn is a brothel and a place next door is called Hell on Wheels; the Madam of the brothel says these are places of sin.
 A man says to a woman, "What about you has the Reid boys so hot under the collar anyway? Maybe I'll just try a taste of that and see" (sex is implied). A deputy tells a robber that he heard the boys in prison took a shine to him (prison sex is implied). An older man buys a scarf for a woman at a street fair and says he will take care of her and her young son; she replies that she is married.
 Dozens of women in a brothel wear long dresses with deeply cut bodices, some sleeveless, to show off a lot of cleavage; the Madam has an ivory leg engraved with black designs and she pulls her skirt up on that leg twice to show it to men (she will not let them touch it). A belly dancer in a sideshow wears a bra and long skirt, revealing midriff as she dances with writhing movements. Women from a brothel walk on the street and a man whistles at them. A woman in a moon-shaped swing hanging from the ceiling reveals legs covered by white tights up to the knee. An elderly Comanche wears trousers and a beaded chest cover, leaving the rest of his upper body uncovered (he's very wrinkly). Comanches in other scenes wear beaded chest plates that reveal abdomens. A male outlaw robs ranch houses and wears the dresses of the female victims; he uses their parasols while riding his horse.

VIOLENCE/GORE 7 - After a canyon gunfight that produces a lot of bloody wounds, the killer cuts out the heart of a Ranger and eats it with his back to the camera (we see blood on the Rangers shoulders and his chest is not shown).
 A Comanche comes upon seven dead Ranger deputies covered in blood and a lot of sand; he digs graves for them and waves a feather over them in a ceremony until one dead man comes to and begins to speak, but the startled Comanche hits him in the head with a shovel; a white horse appears and chooses one grave whose occupant is the one hit with a shovel and the Ranger regains consciousness on top of a tall scaffold built on top of a tall rock pinnacle and while climbing down he finds the Comanche's camp, takes a gun from a hook and points it at the Comanche; they argue and several other Comanches appear, shooting an arrow into the Ranger's shoulder and the scene ends.
 Many Comanches with flaming arrows attack soldiers and the soldiers shoot them until all are dead, using rifles and Gatling guns; many Comanches fall from horses and some horses fall while other horses stampede; the chief dies in close up as the captain stabs him with a cutlass below the frame.
 White men dressed as Comanches fire guns on a ranch, while two women, a man and a boy fire back; one bandit kills a man outside in shadows and scalps him (we cannot see the cut or blood) when a Comanche and a Ranger ride up to help as two bandits burn down the barn; after a lot of gunfire, a beam falls on the head of two bandits, killing them and we see some blood; the house burns down and the women and boy are gone; the Comanche throws a knife into the chest of a bandit, killing him with a little blood shown. A crook takes a woman and a boy behind a rock to shoot them, he shoots in the air three times and tells them to run away; the crook's boss shoots him dead from off screen.
 A flashback shows a Comanche boy saving two white men from death in the desert and leading them to silver ore; we hear that the whites burned down his village and killed the people; we see charred teepees, dead bodies and some blood as the boy walks through the camp until he finds his pet raven dead in a puddle of water and we hear that his mind is broken as an adult; the boy paints stripes down his face with the bird's blood.
 A man tells a boy with a gun to shoot a Texas Ranger; the boy hesitates and does not shoot; the man puts the Ranger in front of a US Army firing squad but a Comanche and Chinese workers roll a train car in front of the intended victim allowing him to escape; many Comanches arrive and shoot flaming arrows as the soldiers fires rifles and Gatling guns to kill the Comanches; the lone Comanche and the Ranger escape on a handcar and travel to a train trestle bridge, blowing it up to fill the screen with a loud explosion and fire.
 An outlaw and a Comanche chained in a train car argue with their captors; the outlaw has a split lip and a gold tooth and is very dirty in appearance while the Comanche has mystic face paint and a dead raven on his head; he waves his hands in a sort of ceremony several times in the film and a live raven appears somewhere else; two deputies draw guns after the outlaw digs a gun out of the floorboards (we see that his fingers have been bloodied) and shoots both deputies (we see some blood); a District Attorney enters and the outlaw chains the Comanche and him together as the sliding door opens and a bunch of bandits with drawn guns pull the outlaw out and onto a horse; a deputy pulls one man out of a train car with a whip around the ankle while the chained men escape and run across the roofs of the train cars to avoid a posse of deputies and outlaws; the engineer and fireman in the locomotive are shot dead with loud noise and blood while the Comanche swings by his chain from a telegraph pole and kicks a deputy away until the locomotive derails, pulls down a row of telegraph poles, and throws a long piston rod that stabs into the dirt between the place where the attorney and the Comanche end up sitting; the rod stops the engine that slides toward them and the Comanche goes to jail.
 In a long sequence, one train is stolen and a second train pursues with people on both trains shooting at each other and breaking all the windows; a few people fall from loud gunshots that make thudding noises as they hit the bodies; both trains separate, some cars fall over a bridge into water, other empty cars derail and a single car turns sideways on the tracks and gets broad-sided by another section of cars; in an office car, one man is shot in the leg by another man and Gatling gunfire splinters the car and windows, with no one else being shot; in a storage car, men from the Army, the Texas Rangers, and the Railroad all point guns at one another and a small boy points a gun at a man until another man brings in a woman and guns are lowered; the boy cries because he hears that his father is dead; a Comanche moves from one train to the other on a ladder tipped across the roofs, while another man rides a horse across the roofs of one train and through the cars of another train while a bandit shoots through a train car at the native but misses several times and the Comanche throws rocks at another man in a train running parallel to his as the man shoots and misses; a woman is struck in the head with a rock (she suffers a red welt), a short length of cars from a train stops at the very edge of a broken bridge and two men almost fall out, but are safe as one pulls the other away from the edge; a Comanche on a train hits an Army captain with a shovel and knocks him out of the train car while on the roof, and an outlaw with a knife and a Ranger fistfight and the Ranger knocks the outlaw off the car (he lands in another car that rides off the tracks and into a ravine and he is apparently killed). A railroad exec riding on top of four open cars full of silver ore goes over a bridge after it explodes; in the river, the rocks weigh him down and he is presumed dead.
 A Comanche and a Ranger escape from bandits by falling down a mineshaft and running when the fire of lit dynamite chases them after an explosion; they follow the tunnel to a lake and swim to safety on a shore as the dead bodies of men float by.
 A train containing a church congregation and a District Attorney is robbed by bandits: one bandit shoots a preacher in the thigh and the preacher screams (we later see him on a crutch and wearing a bandage with some blood on it). A Comanche with face paint and forearm tattoos throws a Ranger wearing a suit to the ground three times, putting a knife to his throat the last time (he is not harmed). A Ranger hits two men in the head with a gun butt several times and shoots a gun out of another man's hand, but never draws blood. A Comanche sews up a Ranger's injured shoulder using a giant quill amid screaming and he says that he sterilized the quill by urinating on it.
 A man falls under his horse, escapes, limps to another man who tries to help him walk, but is shot in the left shoulder and falls. One scene and a flashback of it show a masked man and a Native American with six-shooters robbing a bank vault of nitroglycerin and dynamite while the patrons just stare in disbelief. A Ranger talks to Native Americans in a large tent and two men put knives to his neck; we then see a Comanche and a Ranger buried up to their necks in dirt and scorpions climb their faces until a horse walks up, eats the scorpions and pulls the Ranger out of the dirt and he rides away, but comes back for the Comanche.
 The film is set in the American Old West, where most people have and carry a handgun and a rifle. Many scenes feature posses of men with rifles, outlaws with guns and the US Army with handguns, rifles, swords, knives and Gatling guns. Native Americans and whites dressed as Indians use flaming arrows and knives during attacks.
 A bandit hits a henchman with rocks of silver ore for being "stupid" and the second man takes a lantern into a mining tunnel and does not return; the first bandit shoots a Chinese worker dead for being "stupid" (no blood is shown); two more bandits enter the tunnel with a lantern and do not return but an ore car wheels out, the outlaws shoot it, approach, they see lit dynamite inside the car and are blown off screen, but no one dies. Several people slap each other in different scenes: A Comanche slaps a deputy; a woman slaps a crook after spitting in his face; a man slaps a boy in the face; a bandit slaps a woman and one outlaw slaps another outlaw.
 A Ranger and a Comanche fight over a bandit they caught; the native wants to shoot him and the Ranger wants to take him to jail; the Ranger hits the Comanche unconscious with a shovel, ties the bandit's wrists and makes him walk on the end of a rope behind a horse through the desert; in town, a railroad executive kicks the bandit in the face twice, causing blood to flow. A 100-year old Comanche works in a Depression Era sideshow, telling a boy about his adventures; the Comanche is wrinkled and partially bent at the back; the boy looks a little scared and fires his cap gun at the man while we see a wild hairy man snarling and another man with an extremely long beard. A man steals a locomotive, pulling down a bandstand from which many band members fall; we later see them with bandaged heads that show some blood seepage as they continue to play their instruments.
 Many US soldiers arrive at a railway station and they push Chinese workers out of the way while their captain brags about having killed 10 times as many Indians as Indians killed whites recently. A Comanche and a Ranger are held captive by Comanches that dance a death dance around a large fire.
 A Texas Ranger and a Comanche argue about what they will call themselves in the future. A railroad exec tells a coworker that he hoped to wipe out the Comanches so that no one would ever remember them after the railroad took over their lands. An attorney joins his brother as a Texas Ranger to capture a killer that cuts organs out of victims and eats them; we hear that he cut out a heart, the eyes and the left foot of various victims and we hear that he cut off the leg of a ballerina, who now has an ivory leg that contains a shotgun.
 A man licks blood off his razor after an accidental scratch. A Comanche tastes a bit of sand nearby, digs in the sand, and finds a train track. At a campfire, a rabbit is seen roasting and several other rabbits come close, one screeches and shows fangs as a piece of roasted rabbit is tossed to him and all the rabbits pounce on it. We see a rabbit eat a scorpion. A horse stands in the desert and falls over dead.
 Many people with pitchforks and torches enter a brothel and a Ranger and a Comanche run to the burning roof where their horse stands; they get on the horse, jump to the ground and ride away. A wounded woman climbs out a train window, across the train car outside over water and into another window safely. A clothed woman lying in a bed wears a bloody bandage on her head and as she gets up to walk, she becomes dizzy and stumbles.
 After burying six other rangers a Comanche places an unconscious man on a stretcher being pulled by a horse. In a close-up, we see feces drop under the horse and the horse's feet move off screen to the right, dragging the head of the unconscious man through the feces. Later, the man is awake, touches the back of his head, smells his fingers and grimaces (we see no feces).

LANGUAGE 3 - 13 mild obscenities, name-calling (stupid, fools, idiot, crazy, Injun, boy, half-wit, wet brain, heathens, lizards), stereotypical references to Native Americans, outlaws, CEOs, railroad investors, heroes, the Union Army, the Chinese, railroad executives, churchgoers, lawyers, saloon prostitutes, 2 religious profanities, 12 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - A Chinese woman puts lipstick on a white woman who later touches it and wonders if it is drugged because she becomes dizzy (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details) and a man puts snuff in his cheek. Two men in a train drink from beer bottles, several saloon scenes feature the bar filled with short glasses of various liquors that men drink, a brothel bar is filled with beer bottles and men drink from them, a horse drinks a bottle of beer from a case and then chews the glass (there's no blood), men and women drink wine in several office and parlor scenes, a few outlaws and deputies drink whiskey from small bottles while on horseback, a man chain-drinks on a horse tossing each empty bottle onto the ground, men drink glasses of champagne at a railroad opening, and a kiosk sells alcohol-containing patent medicines.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Corporations, greed, business ethics, Native American genocide, family, responsibilities, duty, crime, justice, prostitution, children with guns, courage, determination, sacrifice.

MESSAGE - Corporate and criminal greed eventually backfire on their perpetrators.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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