Sometimes you only stay in the theater because it’s super hot and muggy outside and your apartment is somehow even hotter.

I feel kind of bad for everyone involved in this heap of steamy garbage. Not bad enough to forgive them, maybe, but bad enough to wonder how no one had the heart to tell Verbinsky and Depp that they have become quite terrible at their work.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating – Johnny Depp has apparently decided to let costumes do all of his acting for the duration of his career. In this case, it’s a silly hat with a dead bird on it and a great deal of mud-based body paint. The hat is meant to indicate that Depp’s Tonto is living with a foot in the great beyond, but Depp’s performance reads more like a severe inner ear disorder exacerbated by thorazine. He is the worst thing in this movie, and that’s saying something.

In addition to making Johnny Depp awful at acting forever, director Gore Verbinski also did great violence to the source material. In his imagining of the Lone Ranger legend, our hero is an ineffectual fop pressed into service when his far more useful brother is killed. Tonto is a halfwit who is always bouncing between crippling guilt and an obsession with revenge. He hates the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger hates him. There is no one worth attaching to in this whole exercise.

Even worse is the framing device that allows for the annoying voiceovers and artless exposition. It is not a spoiler to say that old Tonto is part of a carnival sideshow. He spends all day in a diorama literally called ‘The Noble Savage’. He tells his long, rambling story to some random kid. It is not a spoiler because this idea sucks so hard it is mathematically immune to spoilage. Science, folks. It’s mathematical science. Do not put this movie in your brain.

P.S. If the villain can eat a human heart and half the movie can be set in a brothel, PG-13 doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean. I’m just sayin’.