Take the basic plot of Chinatown, throw in A Fistful of Dollars and add a pinch of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Mash it all up and serve with a helping of knowing irony to prepare a serving of Rango, perhaps the strangest children’s film you’ll see from Hollywood this year.
The film reunites Johnny Depp with his Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski in the sort of movie that the Spaghetti Western-loving Quentin Tarantino might have stitched together if he made a computer animated feature. It’s an uneven but enjoyable pastiche of the genre that winks slyly at films such as The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and Django.
Depp voices Rango, a skittish pet lizard that finds himself lost in the Mojave Desert after his terrarium is shattered when his owners are involved in a car crash. He stumbles upon the town of Dirt, where he claims the job of sheriff and tries to become gunslinging hero to the townsfolk. And Dirt is a town in need of a hero. It is a desperate place, besieged by desperado hawks and rattlesnakes, and bled dry of the water it needs to sustain life.
Rango’s strongest point is a bold visual style that will remind gamers strongly of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, a videogame set in a similarly weird Wild West animal kingdom. Its panoramic desert landscapes evoke the harsh, parched deserts and lawless frontier towns of the West as vividly as any Sergio Leone movie.
But it is the fantastically drawn and animated menagerie of desert critters that gives Rango such a strong identity of its own. The scaly and furry varmints of Rango are endearingly ugly creations — many of them scarred and snaggletoothed with chewing tobacco-stained chins. Rango himself is an awkward, gangly creature with bug eyes.
The actors behind these characters infuse them with believable life and emotion. One reason for this is that Verbinski chose to bring them all together on a stage for motion capture and voice recording. There’s chemistry between the cast that is missing from most big-budget animated films where it is rare for the voice actors to ever meet.
Depp is at his quirky, comical best as Rango, a smooth-talking yet nervy lizard seeking reinvention as a fearless reptile with no name. Apart from Depp, Rango skips cameos by big name celebrities and uses reliable character actors such as Harry Dean Stanton and Alfred Molina instead. The great Ned Beatty as the town patriarch channels the oily gravitas of John Huston in Chinatown while Bill Nighy oozes pure menace as Rattlesnake Jake.
Despite the excellent voice acting and the visual splendour, Rango is let down by a pedestrian story and lacklustre writing. The plot and its execution, sadly, are nowhere near as original as look of the film. Rango also doesn’t manage to reconcile the bits for the kids and the bits for the grown-ups quite as well as, say The Incredibles or the first two Shrek movies. For that reason, it doesn’t soar as high as Pixar or Dreamworks at their best.
Despite the light-hearted scenes showcased in trailers for the film, Rango isn’t afraid to go to dark places. There are a few on-screen deaths that younger children may find upsetting as well as a few mystical, hallucinatory scenes that will probably confuse them. They’ll probably also miss the meaning of the many smart-alecky film parodies of Blazing Saddles, Leaving Las Vegas and Apocalypse Now (among other films) in Rango.
Rango trailer (via YouTube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdwiPK8RFaQ&feature=related
Adults, meanwhile, may be bored by the corny homilies that the film parades about the virtues of being yourself and the mild toilet humour and slapstick moments thrown in for the kids. Clichéd plot devices and wholesale lifting of scenes from other films are rife, though the film keeps nudging you in the ribs to let you know that it is just joking. In its best scenes, it gets away with it — its riff on the stock Western scene where the stranger enters the town saloon is genuinely funny, for example.
Whatever failings Rango suffers from, it’s one of the most visually bold big-budget animated films to come out of a studio that isn’t Pixar. There are a handful of brilliant scenes in Rango that justify its ticket price — and for once, that ticket price isn’t inflated by a 3D tax since the film is presented in good old-fashioned, glorious 2D. — Lance Harris, TechCentral
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