THE LONE RANGER (Rated PG-13)

Sometimes you put your money on the wrong horse. It has happened to me, on more than one occasion, at the Santa Anita race track. It can also happen in making other choices in life.

That occurred most recently in picking to review “The Lone Ranger” instead of “Despicable Me 2.” A revisionist Western tale, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Gore Verbinski, seemed like a sure bet.

The best thing about “The Lone Ranger,” produced at a cost to rival the GDP of a Third World country, is in fact the Lone Ranger’s beautiful white horse, Silver, an equine hero and great scene-stealer.

Possessing a distinct personality, Silver holds a beguiling combination of mystery, humor, majesty, eccentricity and heroism. This is a horse that suddenly appears in treetops and on the roof of a burning barn.

Now we don’t want to slight the human actors in “The Lone Ranger,” especially since the filmmakers put a lot on the line by casting Johnny Depp as the Native American warrior Tonto.

It is also apparent that the Bruckheimer-Verbinski team, which produced the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, put a lot of stock in getting mileage out of Depp’s essential quirkiness.

With heavy face paint and a dead crow sitting on his head, Depp’s Tonto, a proud Comanche with a quiet sense of humor, often looks and sounds like he’s channeling the spirit of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Armie Hammer’s upright, newly-minted federal prosecutor John Reid, soon to become the Lone Ranger, is returning from the east by train to Colby, Texas to start his legal career.

Meeting him in Texas is his older brother Dan (James Badge Dale), a hardened Texas Ranger whose rough frontier nature is a striking contrast to that of his refined and highly educated younger sibling.

At first, John Reid holds the naïve view that playing by the book will trump the extremely violent nature of the Wild West. His worldview is put to the test by a vicious outlaw in custody on the train.

Soon to be the arch enemy of the Lone Ranger, the fiendish Butch Cavendish (a horribly disfigured William Fichtner) is freed by Butch’s gang in a daring railway hijacking.

As a result, Reid finds himself chained to another prisoner onboard, which turns out to be Tonto, taken prisoner for a transgression that already I do not recall.

Setting up the inevitable pairing of Tonto and Reid as crime fighters takes considerable time. It happens most dramatically when Tonto comes to the rescue of Reid after a brutal ambush by Cavendish’s gang.

Once in Texas, Reid teams up with his brother and other lawmen to hunt down Cavendish, but unfortunately they are all gunned down in a desolate canyon.

Tonto stumbles upon the massacre scene and proceeds to bury everyone, including a presumed dead John Reid, who rises from his makeshift grave just in the nick of time.

At this point, Reid dons the famous black eye mask and wide-brimmed white hat, transforming himself into the fabled Lone Ranger, seeker of justice on the dusty plains.

Motivated as much by desire to avenge his brother’s cold-blooded murder, the Lone Ranger also has an odd longing for his brother’s widow (Ruth Wilson), who had once been his girlfriend before he moved east for law school.

While Butch Cavendish is the ultimate badass outlaw and the obvious target for a manhunt by the Lone Ranger and Tonto, other dubious characters populate the landscape.

Helena Bonham Carter has an impressive turn as the peg-legged Southern madam running a house of ill-repute that follows the railroad as it is being built. She’s flamboyant and has a shotgun concealed in her fake leg.

A superb actor, Tom Wilkinson appears as railroad tycoon Latham Cole, hell-bent on his vision of finishing the Transcontinental Railroad in great haste.

Whenever Wilkinson is in a film, he’s almost invariably a person of dubious moral character, if not an outright villain. For “The Lone Ranger,” his railroad builder is kind of what you would expect.

“The Lone Ranger” is a distended exercise in long, drawn-out action, though the climax on a runaway train offers the dramatic heroics that are most worthy of the Lone Ranger’s mythological history.

A lot of money was spent to give “The Lone Ranger” a spectacular look in its setting in Monument Valley and other locations that recall the cinematic brilliance of John Ford Westerns.

My guess is that “The Lone Ranger,” which is oddly uneven and not very satisfying in the end, won’t have the success necessary to launch a new franchise.

DVD RELEASE UPDATE

In perfect timing for this week’s movie review, another story of the Old West is being released on DVD, the television series “How the West Was Won.”

Based on the 1962 film of the same name, this TV show was a rousing action saga and moving family chronicle about the post-Civil War era (the same time period for “The Lone Ranger”).

The TV show starred “Gunsmoke” legend James Arness as a mountain man accustomed to the harsh realities of frontier life, while his widowed sister-in-law, Kate (Eva Marie Saint), struggled to maintain a home for the family.

Kate’s eldest son, Luke (Bruce Boxleitner), is pursued by the law for deserting the Union Army.

“How the West Was Won,” a beloved TV series of the American West, plays out during a hard-hitting period when laws were frequently broken and progress was charted by individual suffering and survival.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.