Much style, too little payoff

Gore Verbinski tries his hand at stylish horror in A Cure for Wellness.

Director Gore Verbinksi's three Pirates of the Caribbean movies demonstrated a rare flare for visually based comedy -- not just sight gags, but intricately designed sequences in which the gags dropped like pins in a bowling alley. Verbinski later entered the world of offbeat animation with Rango, a story about a chameleon who poses as a tough loner in a dizzyingly off-kilter version of the Wild West.

So, despite the fact that we're bobbing in the dull waters of a pre-Oscar lull, there was reason to hope that Verbinski's latest -- a highly stylized hunk of horror called A Cure for Wellness -- would be eccentric enough to merit attention.

No, I haven't forgotten Verbinski's version of The Lone Ranger, but who in Hollywood isn't entitled to a mega-mistake?

Those looking for intriguing imagery won't be disappointed by A Cure of Wellness, which makes the most of Bojan Bazelli's stunningly suggestive cinematography. But at two-and-half hours in length, this increasingly taxing thriller suggests more than it delivers and finally goes up in flames (literally) in what amounts to a bust of a payoff.

Cast in the movie's central role, Dane DeHaan, a veteran of HBO's In Treatment, makes you wonder whether he has the right stuff to carry a movie. DeHaan, who appears in nearly every scene, plays Lockhart, an ambitious but callow young executive with dubious ethical standards.

Early on, Lockhart receives an odd assignment; he's sent to a spa in the Swiss Alps to retrieve his company's CEO (Harry Groener), a man who refuses to return to the US to sign off on a pending and very lucrative merger. The CEO claims that he's seen the light, and no longer gives a damn about business.

Obviously, complications ensue for poor Lockhart. The spa's head doctor (Jason Isaacs) won't allow Lockhart to see the reclusive CEO, much less cart him off the premises. As the movie progresses, Isaacs' Volmer tries to convince Lockhart that he, too, is ill, and should avail himself of the doctor's wondrous cure.

Much effort has gone into showing the strangeness of the spa environment: With its eerie hallways, the place seems more like a mental institution than a retreat where the guests guzzle the local waters, traipse around in bathrobes and play croquet.

Lockhart also meets Hannah (Mia Goth), a strange young woman who seems to hold the key to the movie's central mystery -- which, as it turns out, is not nearly as unexpected as the filmmakers may have think.

Before reaching its overstated conclusion, Justin Haythe's screenplay has dabbled in a variety of twisted developments that include a horrific scene in a dental chair that recalls Dustin Hoffman's torment in Marathon Man, attacks by flesh-eating eels, an obsession with water, and a fairly major letdown at the end when Verbinski serves up heaving sprays of over-the-top expression.

Throughout, the movie spends time condemning the all-American tendency to sacrifice life for work, but the theme doesn't amount to much after an opening prologue in which a broker, working late at night in an empty Manhattan glass tower, keels over and dies of a heart attack.

About halfway through Verbniski's slow-moving dirge of a movie, I made a note to myself. "No matter how artful the setup (an it is plenty artful), a movie such as A Cure for Wellness depends on having one hell of a payoff. Sadly, it doesn't.

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.