Film Review: Rango

Johnny Depp plays an aspiring thespian pet lizard who, due to a literal bump in the road, falls off the back of his owner’s car and gets stranded in the desert.  There, this most wildly western tale (tail? he’s a lizard. BAD JOKES. Oy.) begins.  Hawaiian shirt clad and with friends only in a plastic fish and a headless, limbless Barbie doll, this lizard sets off into the desert and comes across a town, aptly, and wryly, called Dirt.  There, he learns of the town’s crisis – there’s very little water left, and if they don’t get water soon, they will not survive.  Depp’s lizard finds himself in the saloon, surrounded by gritty, toothless, and tough as Dirt folk and knows this is the role of a lifetime.  He transforms himself into Rango, the meanest, toughest sheriff in the land, and eventually leads the desperate people (really animals) to water.

From the very first Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reference, it became clear that Rango, though animated, is not a kids’ movie.  John Logan’s script is snappy and chattery and adult, with that sort of very western movie rhythm, a little bit awkward, a lot too sophisticated for kids.  The story is so gracefully strange and subtle, though.  It’s more obviously greed versus good, but it’s also Rango’s (and each character’s) deep and complicated struggle with identity.  All the characters are so complexly yet understatedly developed, all grappling with wants and needs way beyond water.

The animation is phenomenally gripping and beautiful, the world of Dirt and the Wild West is so visually textured.  Gore Verbinski directed this pic live-action first, his voice actors actually acting out the scenes with each other, and I don’t know what difference that made in the animation itself, but Rango is, regardless, one of the most visually impressive animated films there has been in a long time, and it didn’t even have to be in 3D.  There’s a lesson for you, world.  Anyway, Verbinski’s style is just so him – there are undoubted and very carefully rendered references to himself, or trademarks of his style throughout.  Clearly the dreamlike sequence where Rango meets the Sprit of the West (voiced by a smoldering Timothy Olyphant) in a weird and hazy white scene is directly out of whatever Pirates of the Caribbean movie that was, I think the last one, where Depp is alone in nothing but whiteness.

The Chinatown references, the very western movie homage sensibility of the film, makes Rango really fun for adults to watch and nod knowingly at.  It’s not terribly funny, and I don’t think that was its goal, but it might lack in that department too much for younger kids to appreciate it.  They tried to make up for that with some epic battle scenes that don’t really do much for it.  But Rango is a wonderfully offbeat ode to the western, to animation, in fact to all film, and it deserves the same respect it doles out.

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