If you’re looking for an old-fashioned, rip-roaring western adventure, with dashing heroes, dastardly villains and beautiful girls, where you know who the good guys and bad guys are and you’re not troubled by historical guilt or contradiction – well, Gore Verbinski’s re-engineering of “The Lone Ranger” is not that movie. Actually, let me take that back, or at least rephrase it: This mordant and ambitious work of pop-political craftsmanship both is and is not that movie. It delivers, for my money, the most exciting action sequence in any of this summer’s big spectacles (even counting the destruction of Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion in “Iron Man 3”), a delirious chase-and-fight number staged on board a moving train – set, of course, to the William Tell Overture – that’s equal parts stunt work, digital effects and cinematic derring-do. But it also never lets you forget that the Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-American society across our continent was a thin veneer pasted across a series of genocidal crimes. 
 
 I can already tell I’m going to be a lonely voice on this one, so let me be clear: “The Lone Ranger” has significant problems, including the pairing of Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer as Tonto and the Lone Ranger, which never pays off the way it’s presumably meant to. Verbinski veers back and forth between hard-hitting, often violent dramatic episodes and the low-key, farcical relationship between his two leads, and the effect can be disorienting. Conventional wisdom has already decreed that this movie is a flop, and so be it – don’t let me stand in the way of some satisfying groupthink. Still, I halfway believe that the discordant qualities of “The Lone Ranger” are intentional – and I know for sure that it’s an ambitious and inventive film that’s always trying to tweak formula and play with audience expectations. If anything, it’s overstuffed with imagination and ideas, and when it comes to Hollywood movies I very much prefer that to the default setting. See it with an open mind, and you may well be surprised. 
 
 Let’s back up for a second and consider Verbinski, a director who gets short shrift from critics for reasons that are understandable but maybe unfair. He stayed with the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise at least one movie too long – possibly because he was paid kajillions of dollars – and no doubt should create more distance between himself and the empire of producer Jerry Bruckheimer before he ends up directing “Prince of Persia 2: More Sands of Time” or the proposed “Top Gun” sequel. Except, you know what? If Verbinski makes those movies, I’ll go see them eagerly. He’s made some less-than-good pictures, but he’s never made a boring picture, or one that wasn’t constantly trying to wriggle free of its genre conventions and push in unexpected directions. At his best, as in the American remake of “The Ring” or “Rango” or the first “Pirates,” he belongs on the very short list of Hollywood directors who try to apply an auteurist vision of cinema to the most commercial grade of mass-market commodity movies. (See also: Nolan, Christopher, and Snyder, Zack.) 
 
 As for “The Lone Ranger,” Verbinski and his credited writers (Justin Haythe of “Snitch” and “Revolutionary Road,” along with the “Pirates” duo of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) are trying to do the impossible, or at least the exceptionally difficult: Capture the spirit of an old-timey, square-bear western adventure serial aimed at kids, and also make a dark-hued revisionist western with echoes of “The Searchers,” “Ride the High Country” and “Unforgiven.” While the depredations of the railroad barons serve as a plot point in many films and novels, this story specifically recalls the themes and plot of Frank Norris’ tremendous 1901 California novel “The Octopus” (which may also have helped inspire "There Will Be Blood"). Add to that the movie’s most headline-making aspect, the casting of Depp in what amounts to a lead role as perhaps the most iconic and troubling of all “good Indian” characters, a Comanche outcast who for reasons of his own rides alongside a masked white avenger. 
 
 It remains problematic, to be sure, to see a white movie star (whatever you think about Depp’s purported Cherokee great-grandmother) playing a 19th-century Native American in a crow headdress and black-and-white face paint, delivering broken-English witticisms. But you can’t claim that Depp (one of the movie’s producers) and Verbinski haven’t thought about the problems. Tonto is given a traumatic and complicated back story, an agency and a painful destiny that have never existed before in any “Lone Ranger” iteration, and his isolation from both his own people and the white world makes sense in a new way. 
 
 Quite a few Native American actors appear in the film as Comanche warriors, who are presented with tragic dignity. If anything, these episodes in the film go in such a brooding and serious direction that some viewers may have trouble adjusting. Already consigned to a few hundred square miles in west Texas, the Comanche are betrayed by unctuous railroad tycoon Cole (a fine, slithery role for English actor Tom Wilkinson) and attacked by the U.S. Army – which believes, incorrectly, that the Natives have violated the treaty and raided ranches on the “white” side of the river. As Chief Big Bear (Saginaw Grant) tells the Lone Ranger when he falls into Comanche hands, they know full well how the coming war with the whites will end: “We are already ghosts.” 
 
 Whether Depp’s Tonto is a genuine Native shaman or a con man thriving on white gullibility is left up to the viewer, but either way Tonto is the driving force that transforms Hammer’s John Reid, a stick-up-the-butt, Eastern-educated lawyer, into the white-hatted, gun-totin’ and perhaps literally undead Lone Ranger. In a framing device that definitely pushes the outer boundaries of the grotesque but nearly broke my heart, an aging Tonto – working in a traveling Wild West show in the 1930s – tells the whole story to a small boy in San Francisco who shows up in a Lone Ranger costume. 
 
 Reid just isn’t a very interesting character, unfortunately, and the screwball-comedy episodes of “The Lone Ranger,” when he and Tonto squabble like a mismatched rom-com couple, range from mildly amusing to profoundly irritating. But for the most part Verbinski handles this film’s wild shifts in tone – a specialty of his work, from the Brad Pitt-Julia Roberts thriller “The Mexican” onward – with aplomb. Even the film’s apparent villain, a disfigured and sadistic outlaw named Butch Cavendish (played by the brilliant William Fichtner), is not who he appears to be. Killers like Butch only draw our attention away from the real criminals, who wear nicer clothes and don’t get their hands dirty. Tonto has apparently spent his life believing he’s hunting the Wendigo, a cannibalistic or demonic entity from Native American folklore, but as he tells the real villain near the end of the story, he no longer believes in those stories: “Now I see that you’re just another white man.” ||||| The Lone Ranger 
 
 Action. Starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. Directed by Gore Verbinski. (PG-13. 149 minutes.) 
 
 "The Lone Ranger," produced by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, is an action-movie bloodbath for a children's audience. It has horse manure jokes for the kiddies, as well as scenes of an Indian tribe getting wiped out, a posse of rangers getting shot to death and an intimate interlude in which a man has his heart cut out. In the latter case, you don't actually see the heart being ripped from the body, just the sound of the cutting and hacking. 
 
 But put aside the notion that children shouldn't see this film. No one should. "The Lone Ranger" is a movie for the whole family ... to avoid. It represents 2 1/2 of the longest hours on record, a jumbled botch that is so confused in its purpose and so charmless in its effect that it must be seen to be believed, but better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies. 
 
 Johnny Depp as Tonto is not the problem. Within the limitations of the miserable script, his worried, deadpan take on the Lone Ranger's faithful sidekick borders on funny, and the word "kemosabe" rolls off his tongue as if he'd been saying it all his life. He mugs and pushes, and sometimes can't borrow a laugh - even at a preview with a hyped-up audience - but what is Depp supposed to do? Lie there and give up? Actually, what he's supposed to do is say no to movies like this, but once the mistake has been made, he has only one play, which is to plunge ahead and chase away the looming possibility that he's stuck in the biggest stinker of 2013. 
 
 Aside from all its little problems, "The Lone Ranger" has three big ones: The first is that the character of the Lone Ranger is that of a contemptible idiot. The second is that the Lone Ranger's friendship with Tonto barely exists. (Tonto is too cool to be devoted, and the Lone Ranger is too much of a smug dummy to have emotions that count.) The third is that the filmmakers have no non-mercenary purpose in resurrecting the Lone Ranger as a character. All they know is that, whatever happens, American Indians have to come out looking OK. 
 
 The movie takes about 40 minutes just to crank its plot into motion: John Reid (Armie Hammer), who will soon emerge as the Lone Ranger, wants to capture a sadistic outlaw (William Fichtner) and bring him to justice. He is joined by Tonto, because Tonto is under the impression that Reid is a special spirit, who can't be killed. So right there you have Tonto caring for Reid for reasons that are impersonal, and you have Reid not caring for Tonto at all. You know what? If they don't care, we don't care. 
 
 That seemingly simple throughline becomes contorted and convoluted when set against the linking of the first transcontinental railroad. East and west joined together at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, an event replicated here, only without President Ulysses Grant in attendance. Having a sitting president on the scene just wouldn't do, especially as our heroes, by this time, are intent on blowing up the whole thing, the tracks, the trains, the bridges ... Don't ask. The Lone Ranger might have been too corny for a straight reimagining, but to turn the title character into a moron-antihero and Tonto into a bloodless vacancy was no winning alternative. 
 
 Two of the movie's three screenwriters were collaborators on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, and "The Lone Ranger" shares a family resemblance with that series: It has the clumsy shifts in tone, the lack of motivation, the deliberately conflicted alliances, the mishmash of characters, the desperately boring action sequences (because who cares?) and the aren't-we-cute treatment of the protagonists. It has that other thing, too, the sense of a movie's being stretched to epic length in some vain hope that people might mistake it for an epic. 
 
 Gore Verbinski, who directed the "Pirates" movies, directs this, too, and there are two moments to make you realize that Verbinski doesn't have to make bad movies. He just chooses to. The first is an opening shot of San Francisco in 1933, which shows the Bay Bridge under construction, then swoops down to introduce a boy at a carnival. Nice work, pretty and graceful. The second is the depiction of the seconds before a Comanche attack. There's something in the air, something alive in the silence, like right before the feds slaughtered Bonnie and Clyde. Also good. 
 
 That's 45 watchable seconds. When Verbinski can figure out a way to do that 120 times in a row, he'll really have something. 
 
 Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com
– The Lone Ranger rides into theaters today, amid a bit of excitement for the reunion of Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp, a decent helping of controversy over Depp's casting as Tonto, and a hail of brutal reviews. Here's what critics are saying: It's so bad, it has to be seen to be believed, writes Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle. "But better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies." The Lone Ranger himself is "a contemptible idiot," and "the filmmakers have no non-mercenary purpose" in reviving him. Depp is fine "within the limitations of the miserable script," but he "can't borrow a laugh." Depp may say he wants to move Tonto past the "noble savage" cliché, but "the portrayal is nonetheless bothersome," observes Tim Grierson at Screen Daily, because he's "still a bit of a buffoon," possessed of Depp's cutesy deadpan ticks. The action set pieces, meanwhile, wind up being mind-numbing, because Verbinski keeps "increasing the stakes without much thought to the laws of gravity or the limits of the human body." The movie "will unite generations in bafflement, stupefaction, and occasional delight," writes AO Scott at the New York Times. "Atrocities are followed by jokey riffs and sight gags, and what links them is .. a carnival barker's desperate need to hold on to a distracted audience's attention. Look kids, a man eating another man's heart! A horse in a tree! A genocidal massacre! Bunny rabbits with sharp teeth!" "I halfway believe that the discordant qualities of The Lone Ranger are intentional," writes Alex O'Hehir of Salon, one of the few fans, who thinks it's a smart movie "overstuffed with imagination and ideas." It delivers fun and adventure, but "never lets you forget that the Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-American society across our continent was a thin veneer pasted across a series of genocidal crimes."