There isn’t enough whiskey in the world to wash the taste of The Lone Ranger (or, as it should be called, “The Lone Tonto”) out of my mouth, but I’m willing to try.

I actually had some high hopes when I first heard about it. After all, it was brought to us by the entire team who brought us Pirates of the Caribbean. Then I remembered it was also brought to us by the team who ran Pirates of the Caribbean into the ground, and the same team who violently beat Pirates of the Caribbean to death, and the same team who now has plans to forcibly sodomize the dead corpse of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Early reviews weren’t good, but it had a solid 45% on RottenTomatoes, so I went into it figuring that I’d probably be in for a bad film, but maybe there’d be enough action and Johnny Depp acting wacky to salvage an overall positive film experience. Of course, in just about the last 48 hours, the Rotten Tomatoes has dropped to 25%. Sounds about right.

Where better to start with this crock of shit than with the much-debated choice of having Johnny Depp play Tonto. Now, I enjoy watching tastefully offensive Native American caricatures that perpetuate societal misunderstanding of the cultural heritage of minorities as much as the next guy, and I’m forced to admit that I’m rather glad they cast Depp, since his quirkiness is the only thing that made this festering waste of celluloid palatable. Still, there’s a certain deep uneasiness to chuckling at Tonto’s antics while you try not to remember about the systematic genocide and forced deportation of an entire race of people.

Still, even casual racism comes as a breath of fresh air next to Armie Hammer’s wooden-faced prettyboy The Lone Ranger, who brings the acting prowess of Keanu Reeves in everything he’s ever done. The Lone Ranger is a pretentious, whiny douchebag with a major stick up his ass for about 95% of the movie, and it’s about as enjoyable as it sounds.

The movie itself is a story within a story, told by an ancient Tonto inside a museum set to a wide-eyed white boy who eats peanuts with the shells still on from a popcorn bag. Periodically, the movie is interrupted during exciting moments to bring us back into the museum, which disrupts the flow and helps avoid any sense of rising action. It’s basically a carbon copy of the framing device that The Princess Bride used, except different, because it makes the movie worse in every possible way.

The plot, such as it is, is a hopelessly confusing clusterfuck. So basically, there’s a bad guy and he has a plan. After the rangers get their shit fucked up, Tonto magics his way out of prison and then teleports his way on a two-day journey out in the middle of nowhere, on foot, just in time to help a magical spirit horse raise The Lone Ranger from the dead. They then wander aimlessly and bicker for the next hour and a half until it’s time for the climax aboard two speeding trains.

Along the way, we meet Helena Bonham Carter who plays a prostitute with an ivory leg that has a gun inside it. Yes, I’m serious. Apparently she has some kind of grudge against the bad guy for reasons that are unclear and will never be explained. Then she randomly shows up again at the climax to help our heroes out despite not having any real reason to do so and despite the heroes having no way to actually get a message to her and despite the entire thing being way too fucking complicated for absolutely no reason at all. That’s it. She’s in the entire movie for about three and a half minutes.

But yeah, the plot. The bad guys want to get some silver. That’s about it. I guess they also want to keep it secret, for reasons that aren’t clear, so to help keep it secret, they pretend they are Comanches and murder a bunch of people so the white people think the Comanches broke the treaty, and then come kill the Comanches. For some reason. Because after all, if you’re a bad guy trying to secretly steal a bunch of silver, the best way is to incite panic and have the government send in a squadron of the US Military and a bunch of Texas Rangers!

Naturally, this works like a charm, and so the Comanche tribe launches a horde of arrows at the military in a scene that is straight out of the movie 300. They then charge and are mowed down by machine guns in a scene that is straight out of the movie The Last Samurai. It all goes for naught and we almost have a moment where we’re looking at the butchered corpses of the Native American people thinking, holy shit, what a great message to sneak into a summer blockbuster, and then it’s over! After all, that’s what the Comanche warriors were known for: riding directly into a spray of machine-gun fire instead of using stealth and some fucking cover.

There are a few useless subplots, such as that The Lone Ranger wants to fuck his dead brother’s wife, who is mostly there to pretend like there’s a female character to appeal to girls. She spends most of the movie, appropriately, getting captured and is there to look pretty and be rescued by our heroes. Also, there’s a silver bullet that our heroes carry around that is supposedly the one thing that can kill the bad guy and they won’t use it except to kill the bad guy. Gee, where have I heard of that particular plot device before? Of course (spoiler alert) it’s not actually used to kill the bad guy, so that was an effective use of screentime!

Also, the magic spirit horse eats live scorpions off The Lone Ranger’s face. I did not make that up.

So, if you want to watch bad acting, poor writing, a plot that simultaneously is hopelessly convoluted and yet would not challenge a third grader, a bloated spectacle that is 45 minutes too long where the only good parts are uncomfortably racist, The Lone Ranger is a great way to waste a few bucks.