“That mask make you look like a fatty, kemosabe.”
“Well, that crow makes YOU look like a flock.”

Here’s the thing about summer blockbusters – they come out in the summer.  You don’t need a masters degree in film to figure that out.  Due to release dates and high concept genres, these movies tend to get judged as mindless entertainment — Avengers, Star Trek Into Darkness, Hangover III, etc.  They arrive with pre-conceived notions.  It’s like profiling.  But there’s another summer-related criteria for judging them and that’s the heat index.  When thermometers reach 85 degrees, it’s time to catch a matinee.  It doesn’t necessarily matter what it is, so long as the air-conditioner works.

I caught a noon screening of The Lone Ranger, the latest Depp/Bruckheimer/Verbinski collaboration, on day 6 of a 100+ degree heat wave in ridiculously sunny Southern California.  Thankfully the running time is a whopping 149 minutes because extreme heat is not my thing.  Anything over 90 degrees is overkill in my book.  Above 95 and I get the point — God hates me.  So my rough draft review written during the movie, as opposed to my final draft written after, may be a tad slanted due to global warming.  Here I present both for you to judge.