The story (by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, with an assist from Justin Haythe) is straightforward enough in its early contours: A mild-mannered district attorney named John Reid (Armie Hammer), returns home to the Lone Star state following his big-city education. Upon arrival, however, he is deputized as a Texas Ranger by his decidedly manlier brother (James Badge Dale) in order to help capture the notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner). But things do not go according to plan, and Reid ends up—at least to all appearances—dead. Luckily for him, he is revived by a legendary Spirit Horse (whom he will later repay with the decidedly pedestrian sobriquet "Silver") and a tribe-less and quite possibly deranged Comanche named Tonto (Johnny Depp). Given that Reid is presumed by the world to be deceased, his new partner persuades him to don a mask as they continue their quest to bring Cavendish to justice.

Hokey? Of course. (And I haven't even mentioned the framing narrative, which features an impossibly wizened Tonto telling his story to a young boy at a carnival in 1933 San Francisco...) Yet there's a certain goofy grandeur to the movie's first half or so. Hammer, who played the fabulously wealthy Winklevoss twins in The Social Network—and is himself the great-grandson of the still-more-fabulously-wealthy oil tycoon Armand Hammer—is an amiable enough cinematic presence, and Fichtner is magnificent as Cavendish, snarling and sneering and eating the occasional human body part with demonic aplomb. Moreover, as much as I've tired of Depp's burgeoning menagerie of weirdo performances, his Tonto, though perhaps politically off-key, is at least charitably low-key. (For those who recall Depp in Jim Jarmusch's 1995 neo-Western Dead Man, this is essentially a role reversal, with him taking on the Gary Farmer part as a deadpan Native American sidekick to a clueless white man.)

The movie's early action sequences—in particular one that's set on a runaway train—are witty and inventive, with Verbinski toying neatly with camera placement and spatial geometry. There are likable nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (in particular a railroad subplot and the oscillating dramatic score), Little Big Man, The Searchers, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And the classic catchphrase "Who was that masked man?" is updated for a more ironic age to "What's with the mask?"

But then, somewhere around the hour-and-a-half mark, The Lone Ranger makes the fateful decision not to end. Worse, the movie keeps not-ending for another full hour. Unnecessary backstories unspool, tiresome gimmicks get rolled out—look! there's Helena Bonham Carter as a tough-but-decent prostitute whose wooden leg is really a gun—and dull new villains are revealed to be behind the perfectly compelling originals. The final action sequence (also set on a train) proves to be as exhausting as the first was amusing, with the body count escalating unpleasantly and the William Tell Overture—used sparingly throughout most of the film—commencing to trample everything in its path.