Strong start, then collapse for 'Elysium'

Elysium could have been so much more than it is.

Recently, I was riding my bicycle through one of the Denver area's more expensive neighborhoods, the kind in which once modest homes have been conquered by mini-mansions that probably are priced in multiples of millions. Who, I wondered, can afford to live in such places? What do the residents of these palaces do that enables them to take literally the old axiom that a man's home is his castle?

The growing divide between the rich and the rest of us is the basis for Elysium, a sci-fi spectacle from director Neill Blomkamp, who made waves with his gritty first feature, 2009's District 9.

Set in the late 21st century, Elysium imagines a time when the rude and scoffing multitudes live on devastated planet Earth. Those with major money have moved to Elysium, a giant, circular space station that orbits the Earth. Think of Elysium as the ultimate gated community, a refuge from hardship.

Elysium's residents live well, and have access to medical technology that can cure just about anything.

Of course, someone eventually was bound to crash the high-end party. Enter Matt Damon as Max, an Earth-bound factory drone who receives a massive dose of radiation at work. Max is given five days to live. The only way he can save himself is to sneak into Elysium, and avail himself of its life-saving technology, machines that look like CAT scans, but can diagnose and cure a person in one go-round.

Max's predicament brings him into contact with Spider (Wagner Moura), a criminal who knows how to smuggle folks into Elysium. Of course, there's a condition: Max can go to Elysium only if he agrees to a scheme in which he'll download data from the brain of a wealthy businessman (William Fichtner).

This requires Max to have a coding device of some sort implanted directly into his skull. Spider wants to use the data Max obtains to undermine the two-tier system that has separated humanity into two major groups -- the super-rich and everyone else.

On his initial visit to the hospital after he's radiated, Max reunites with Frey (Alice Braga)) a doctor who had been a childhood pal. As it turns out, the doctor has a terminally ill daughter (Emma Tremblay). Frey hopes that Max will take her child to Elysium, where she can be saved.

Blomkamp does a better job depicting an earthly dystopia than in showing Elysium's abundance, but he does outline the political structure of Elysium. The place has a president, but the real power lies with a ruthless security official (Jodie Foster).
I didn't keep precise track, but I'm guessing that for about an hour Elysium really clicks. At its best, the movie qualifies as an unusually smart helping of sci-fi, a convincing picture of an economically fractured future.

The visual environment (Max lives in a ravaged Los Angeles) is vividly imagined, and, in general, the special effects have top-of-the-line appeal.

Once the movie reaches Elysium, though, it starts to fall apart, sacrificing its intelligence for a more typical payload of futuristic gunplay and violent mayhem.

The performances are uniformly good, although Foster's character is so one-dimensional that she tends to come off as brittle, a woman with a close-cropped haircut and a disapproving look, as if an impudent journalist has dared to ask Foster about something she'd rather not discuss.

Damon does a good job as the sort of everyman who has special qualities of character and a bit of soul.

By its conclusion, Elysium leaves you disappointed and bemused; there's plenty of talent on display and enough obvious intelligence to have elevated the film had the obviously gifted Blomkamp -- who also wrote the screenplay -- been able to follow his best instincts to the finish line.

A ride too long for this Lone Ranger

Director Gore Verbinski's latest has its moments -- but his story about an American icon tries to do too much while dragging on for nearly two-and-a-half hours.

I've long regarded director Gore Verbinski as one of the few filmmakers working today who understands visual comedy, somewhat in the same way that the masters of silent film understood it. It takes nearly all of the intermittently exhausting 149 minutes of The Lone Ranger for Verbinski (of Pirates of the Caribbean fame) to put his best talents on display in an action set piece that, though not quite as fleet or nimble as expected, begins to deliver the summer-movie goods.

Until that point, Verbinski -- who in 2011 won critical and audience approval for the animated Rango -- seems caught in a suffocating trap. He is at once presenting a revisionist view of The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) that makes Tonto (Johnny Depp) into a dominating presence. He's also making winking fun of westerns, paying homage to native Americans and throwing in splashes of block-buster level action.

Does it work? Only in fits and starts. The Lone Ranger becomes a mixed bag of ploys that's evidently supposed to be elevated by Depp's head-liner performance. Depp, of course, is caught in a trap himself. He can't give an over-the-top Jack Sparrow-like performance without trashing Tonto nor can he play the role completely straight.

To steer the movie away from condescension, Depp portrays Tonto as an equal (or perhaps even superior) partner to Hammer's character.

No stranger to oddball costumes, Depp this time coats his face with white paint -- evidently cracked from years of baking in the Western sun. He also wears a dead crow head dress. He's the antithesis of Jay Silverheels, the well-groomed Canadian Mohawk who played Tonto on TV and who talked in clipped, cliched sentences.

In the 2013 edition of The Lone Ranger, Tonto seems like one more weird-ass Depp creation, and, yes, I think it's time that Depp made a real movie, something that didn't have to be released between May and August.

Working with a team of Pirates writers, Verbinski employs a mostly distracting framing device to tell an origins story about America's favorite masked man. During the 1930s, a boy -- dressed in a Lone Ranger costume -- visits an Old West diorama at a carnival.

Before you can say, "Kimosabe," an aged Indian from the diorama ("The Noble Savage in His Native Habitat") comes to life, evidently to tell the real story of the white man who, by the 1930s, already had attained mythic status as The Lone Ranger. The Indian, of course, is Tonto.

The plot is an uninspired amalgam of Western tropes that pits a tenderfoot (Hammer's John Reid, the man who becomes The Lone Ranger) against the ruthless Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), an outlaw who has fallen under the sway of a greedy railroad tycoon (Tom Wilkinson).

John Reid, a devotee of the law who refuses to carry a gun, becomes inspired to capture Cavendish after John's lawman brother (James Badge Dale) falls victim to Cavendish's brutality. Not content with mere murder, Cavendish rips the man's heart out of his chest and eats it. Now, it's true that my memory isn't what it used to be, but I don't think the old TV show featured many instances of cannibalism.

In this outing, Cavendish's foul ways turn Dan's wife (Ruth Wilson) into the widowed mother of a young son.

At times, The Lone Ranger -- shot with plenty of big-vista style by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli -- feels like a serious revival of a classic Western. At other times, the movie plays like a goof on those same westerns. At still other times, it's a surprisingly mournful look at the exploitation of Native Americans.

Hammer makes a decent Lone Ranger, a good foil and straight man for Depp's Tonto, but no actor could have unified the movie's wildly disparate parts, which drag their collective way to the action set piece that provides the movie with its near-rousing finale.

You will learn why The Lone Ranger wears a mask. You'll discover how Tonto came to be estranged from his tribal roots. You'll see how the Lone Ranger acquired Silver, a horse that seems to have magical powers.

Will you care about any of this? Not so much, to borrow an anachronistic phrase Tonto overworks. The Lone Ranger tends to be increasingly enervating right up until the time that Verbinski breaks out an amped-up version of the Ranger's signature tune, the famed William Tell Overture.
Verbinski tries to return us to (and debunk) what the original radio show and, then, the TV version called "the thrilling days of yesteryear," but in this version too much of the thrill is gone.

"Hi ho, Silver!," the cry that defined the character played by Clayton Moore on TV, could just as well have been "Oh no, Silver!"

The Lone Ranger probably should have remained a relic, a bit of cherished radio and TV nostalgia -- and not much else.*

*For the record: The Lone Ranger is better than 1981's The Legend of the Lone Ranger, but then so is almost everything -- and that includes most street busking.