There are plenty of Hollywood filmmakers who keep getting work but never achieve any level of critical success. This isn’t a mystery. Financial success can be easier to gain than critical acclaim. But as anonymously-produced as some blockbusters tend to be (especially now that digital effects are the penny candy of big studios), they still need someone at the helm--directors like Roland Emmerich, Francis Lawrence, James Mangold and Gore Verbinski, all of whom have at some point directed big-budget, little-integrity films.These filmmakers all know the language of American cinema. They understand the mass appeal of constant cutting, rapid pacing, and what does and doesn’t work in a sold-out suburban movie theater. Most of the films made by these directors seem to lack any kind of signature style. At a glance, it doesn’t look like the studios behind Knight and Day, I Am Legend, Constantine, The Day After Tomorrow, and most importantly, The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, allowed any idiosyncrasies to harm their potential blockbusters. At least, that seems the case until you view some of these films more closely--especially those of Gore Verbinski.Verbinski exemplifies the Hollywood filmmaker who remains completely faceless to avid moviegoers. Most audiences don’t care one bit about directors, but pretty much everyone in America knows who Christopher Nolan is, and Pirates of the Caribbean reached an even larger audience than Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Even "movie people" often fail to recognize Verbinski’s name--mention his works, however, and people’s squinting eyes pop with realization.Chronologically, Verbinski's films are Mouse Hunt, The Mexican, The Ring, The Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy, The Weatherman, Rango, and this year’s The Lone Ranger. He’s managed to make films that earn over a billion dollars globally, without himself becoming a celebrity. A big part of his anonymity resides in the fact that he’s only made films for major motion picture studios. Doing so doesn’t mean a director’s films have to be vanilla--David Fincher ( Fight Club, Se7en) has worked in the studio system his entire career, and all of his films have a distinct style, often pushing the envelope when it comes to violence and disturbing content.Like Fincher, Verbinski has a style, though it's less apparent because he works behind a mask. This mask is the emulation and pastiche of his influences. Every one of his films references other films from the respective genre to help round out the visual style or the storytelling method of the film. It doesn’t seem like much, but building on top of what people already know and love helps them connect to a film in a very real way. Like a beloved song on a long road trip, this technique makes the experience more memorable. Strategically placing what's familiar also encourages critics and audiences to overlook script flaws, misplaced expectations due to poor marketing, and anything else out of the director's hands. In Verbinski’s latest films, Rango and The Lone Ranger, his mask loosens a bit. These are strange films; plenty accessible, but still odd enough to raise eyebrows. And they’re good. Very good. Lone Ranger is being critically burned at the stake right now, primarily because Verbinski, at this point in his career, imitates his filmmaking heroes too well. He’s developed a knack for creating homages that often sail over critics' heads. This isn’t him showing off--Verbinski uses other filmmakers’ techniques to tell a better story. Rango and The Lone Ranger are both westerns, a genre that American audiences have grown estranged from over the decades--HBO's 2004 series Deadwood being a notable exception, as well as James Mangold's stellar 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma (1957). This film did well critically, but barely made its money back. So, why did Paramount and Disney ask Verbinski to make two odd-duck westerns? Because he brings more to the table than a typical Hollywood bench-warmer might.Verbinski’s career started in commercials and music videos, which is common with Hollywood directors, including Fincher, Zack Snyder ( 300, Man of Steel) and Michael Bay ( Transformers, Armageddon). The “Bud. Weis. Er.” Frogs were Verbinski’s brainchild. But his first foray into true filmmaking made much less of an impact than the beer ad: Mouse Hunt (1997) began Verbinski’s track record of financial success and critical failure. It’s a weird film and was probably incredibly difficult to market. As silly and childish as the premise of two grown men versus a mouse appears, Verbinski handles the movie not unlike the early works of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam. The set design is Dickensian, using soot blackened characters and locations, even though the script never alludes to the time period. The camera work is off-kilter and dynamic, making for disorienting dialogue sequences and a rollicking good time whenever the audience sees from the mouse’s point of view. At its best the film feels like a nod to Edward Scissorhands, Brazil, and Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches, which met the exact opposite fate of Mouse Hunt. With a positive critical landslide, but almost nothing in the way of box office returns, The Witches remains a film buff's secret pleasure. Mouse Hunt, while a true box office success (costing $38 million dollars and earning $122 million), now lives in Walmart's five dollar bin. Thus began Verbinski's ascent. The Mexican (2001) became another entry in his high-gross, low-acclaim book. For this second film, he dropped the Burton-esque camera angles and Dickensian sets for a sweaty, dirty style that lives in shades of orange and green. In fact, apart from Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, the film is populated almost entirely by character actors whose features resemble road maps. Creepy background players have become a major part of Verbinski’s repertoire, and nearly every film he’s made since is populated by the strangest-looking people. He uses their appearance in scenes like foreboding music, and the mood they convey is far subtler than a sweeping orchestral composition.In the early 2000s, Hollywood's imagination began running on fumes. This first decade of the new millennium saw Platinum Dunes, a company co-owned by Michael Bay, produce eight remakes of classic 60’s and 70’s American horror films--to the chagrin of pretty much everyone. At the same time, Hollywood sneakily targeted a genre unknown to most Americans: Japanese Horror. These adaptations of Japanese horror films grew steadily worse as the decade wore on, but the first few examples--starting with 2002’s The Ring--actually set the bar fairly high. The Ring establishes a beautiful visual aesthetic early on and doesn't falter.Much the same way that The Mexican’s color palette makes you feel grimy and sweaty, The Ring traps you at the bottom of a well (like the film’s villain, Samara). Verbinski and his director of photography Bojan Bazelli, using blue, gray and green, enhance the Washington state shooting locations to give the film a clammy atmosphere, before bringing in any actors. Nor does the director skimp on talent this time; Naomi Watts is excellent, and she likely starred in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong because she's an incredible screamer. In The Ring, Verbinski does what subsequent horror remake directors didn’t--pay tribute to the original film. Patience is the key here, and when scares arrive they're thoroughly surprising. He rarely uses cheap sound blasts or quick cutting to frighten the audience. Instead, he uses what worked so well in classic horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist--quiet, meditative filmmaking, and a script built on mystery and well-defined characters. These combined elements helped a film costing $48 million dollars to gross more than $250 million worldwide.In 2002 Verbinski signed on to direct a movie based on a theme park ride. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl became a box office giant, grossing over $654 million dollars worldwide. Despite Verbinski only being forty-nine, he was raised on the swashbuckling adventure films of Hollywood’s Golden Age (1927 – 1963), available in second or third run movie theaters. He signed on because he saw a chance to take moviegoers everywhere back to his childhood.Verbinski wanted to use modern movie-making techniques to return pirate films to the spotlight. The film contains over 600 visual effects shots, and many sequences were actually shot twice--once on location and once on a motion-capture stage. This digital work would be necessary for the following two Pirates films, but more importantly it prepared Verbinski for Rango, a film shot entirely on sound stages with voice actors physically playing their roles (the footage then helped animators give the characters more dynamic movements and ways of speaking).Verbinski also involved himself with Black Pearl’s screenplay, making sure the final product was as exciting, scary, and funny as he remembered the old Hollywood pirate films being. The franchise's next two installments, Dead Man's Chest (2006) and At World's End (2007), go from bad to worse script-wise. Verbinski, however, continues his trend of wretched-looking background characters, and in At World's End, delivers an absolutely bizarre purgatory sequence, flaunting genuine prowess with visual perception. In the end, his take on pirate films allowed movies based on a theme park attraction to gross nearly 2.7 billion dollars, even though both sequels did poorly with critics. After resurrecting the pirate genre, Verbinski decided westerns should crawl from the grave next. Rango, his first western and animated film, performed well despite broken animated-movie-laws. There are no cute characters. Everyone's ugly as sin, including the protagonist, and this probably lowered the financial return (compared with Verbinski’s previous films), making only double its budget in tickets sold. People can certainly handle ugly characters, but Rango is also a western, which has become less and less popular since the 1970s. Verbinski forsaw these hurdles, though, and ramped up the references to successful genre films, including Chinatown, Star Wars, and even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When Pixar first mixed adult appeal into kids’ films with Toy Story (1995), Verbinski noted this strategy and began catering to film lovers, not just film-goers. People with deep film knowledge can pull plenty of references from Rango, and it becomes clear that Verbinski has a vast reservoir of influences. Those influences definitely turned critics’ heads, and Rango is currently Verbinski’s best received film. The director’s strategic pastiche continues in The Lone Ranger, which utilizes the plot of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, full scene nods to Once Upon a Time in the West and Buster Keaton’s The General, and the “print the legend” moral from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. By paying careful homage to iconic films and sequences, Verbinski shoots two arrows from his bow at once. He’s reconnecting older audiences to the culturally relevant films they grew up with, while using an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to entertaining his younger viewers.Verbinski’s films act as a wonderful gateway between generations, allowing parents and children to bond through cinema. Because the oddities in The Lone Ranger outnumber its references, however, many people are skipping it. Also, Johnny Depp’s casting as a Native American has caused some controversy. The film does spends generous run-time condemning our nation’s treatment of Native Americans which, of course, is an important message; but this pauses the fast-moving adventure to make its viewers uncomfortable. Lone Ranger’s poor performance is ultimately due to Verbinski trying to juggle too many things at once.The evolution of his directorial voice--his need to pay homage to classic films and genres (as well as instill morals)--puts Verbinski's at risk of losing both critics and audiences. The anonymous style that big studios trust has become a duty; whether or not his passions will let him uphold it remains to be seen. Like the Lone Ranger, Verbinski needs to keep his identity hidden--to never take off the mask.____ Tucker Johnson lives in Boston. He has a BA in Film Production, and eats, sleeps and breathes filmmaking.