In a nutshell:
it ain't pretty. I link the review, both because I value his service and skill as a reviewer, and also because of the cultural implications of said review. Some excerpts:
I’ve seen many movies that were objectively worse than The Lone Ranger. Very few have made me angrier.
This is not because I have any personal attachment to the character. Like most people my age, I don’t. Even so, the Lone Ranger is an iconic member of a fraternity of heroes in masks or capes that includes Zorro, Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. While some of these (notably Batman) have been more ambiguously portrayed than others, generations of children have looked up to these icons as much for their high moral codes as their prowess and cool accoutrements.
Even more than Man of Steel, The Lone Ranger is the poster child for our culture’s terminal inability to offer children today heroic role models. It’s as cynical and bankrupt an exercise of pop moviemaking as any would-be summer blockbuster I can think of....
The Lone Ranger was explicitly created and developed as a role model for children. He never drank or smoked, never shot to kill, and explicitly followed a “creed” that included belief in “my Creator, my country, my fellow man.” I’m open to a new take on the character reexamining what a role model should look like today, but this film’s masked man is someone no one could possibly look up to.
A strange framing device finds an elderly Tonto in a Wild West show in 1933 San Francisco, relating the story of the Lone Ranger to a young boy in a Lone Ranger mask. At first the boy is skeptical of Tonto’s version of events: The Lone Ranger would never rob a bank. At least boys of that generation had stories about iconic heroes whose virtue and heroism they believed in implicitly. What stories about iconic heroes do our children have?
What iconic heroes, indeed. Hollywood does manage the occasional well-done movie. Nolan's Batman trilogy, for example; or even Wedon's Avengers movie, plus some of the better films in the Marvel franchise leading up to it. And it's true that there have always been some flops in Hollywood; but those flops used to be merely matters of poor writing or poor character development, low budget pitfalls and so on. Now the flops are truly flips, in that they attempt to flip moral uprightness on its head, or in general to flip the bird to religion or even simple decency. A poorly developed character is one thing; a poorly developed character whose poor development comes about because the screenwriters are busily looking for one more way to get a jab in at religion, or traditional morality, or even just American patriotism is simply cynical.
We live in a world in which children are often literally sacrificed to the altar of "personal choice" and "personal freedom," by which is meant philistine libertinism. In that same world, those children who survive are often condemned to see their childlike innocence sacrificed on the altars of sex, money, and notoriety. It's certainly sad to see so many childhoods destroyed by a cynical mindset which sees said innocence as a thing to be uprooted, undermined, and ultimately abolished in the name of lifestyle hedonism, or feminism, or utilitarianism, or whichever ideology is in vogue in LA or New York.
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