“The Lone Ranger” is the last remnant of a three year long period where Disney kept trying to replicating the success of the “Pirates of The Caribbean” movies, with movies like “Prince of Persia” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, to disastrous results. With Marvel making successful movies like “Iron Man 3” and “The Avengers” for Disney (not to mention LucasFilm’s new Star Wars movies coming in 2015), it’s likely that Disney is happy to put this chapter of the company’s history into the past. It comes to an end with the “The Lone Ranger”, a movie that has moments of greatness, but is kept back by a subpar Johnny Depp and a terrible script.

John Reid (Armie Hammer) is an educated man, who’s hatred for guns is only outsized by his respect for the law. When he has a brutal and violent run in with Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), he is forced to team up with Tonto (Johnny Depp), a quirky Native American who has his own score to settle with Cavendish.

That’s one of the more barren plot descriptions I’ve ever written for one of my reviews, but the truth is if I gave away anymore we’d have to deal with the movies spoilers and overcomplexity. This is has to be one of the most overlong movies I’ve seen in ages, there’s at least 40 minutes of stuff here that could’ve been cut without losing anything essential. Perhaps some of the more graphic violence (which at times makes even something like “World War Z” look tame in comparison) or the movies many instances of tonal inconsistencies could’ve been left on the cutting room floor in order to create a more coherent flick.

Armie Hammer, a superb actor that I loved in “The Social Network”, does OK in this role, having some instances of charisma but also working with a terribly underwritten character arc. Johnny Depp is woefully miscast as Tonto, with many of his moments where he’s trying to replicate the dialect of Native americans coming across as more racist than realistic. Plus, great actors like Tom Wilkinson and Helena Bonham Carter seem lost in the movie in their sorely underdeveloped roles.

And yet, some shades of brilliance emerge in this movie. After all, director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp’s last collaboration was the perfect and underrated flick “Rango”.  Some aspects of that film are brought over, such as cast members (Depp and Stephen Root namely) and setting a gigantic action sequence to classic music. Actually, that sequence is one of the film’s few perfect moments, with it’s display of mesmerizing action that’s impossible not to both enjoy and admire. Still, even this scene has it’s problems, since it sometimes feels a little clumsily edited and amazingly steals one of the best lines from “Rango” in the process.

I can’t say I ever hated my experience with “The Lone Ranger”; honestly, there were many moments of the kind of awesomeness we expect out of our best summer blockbusters. Yet, the whole film feels like a missed opportunity, with most of the film feeling like it could’ve been so much more than it wound up being. It’s not as bad as many say, but “The Lone Ranger” still isn’t able to ride off into the sunset perfectly.