About as creative, engrossing, and quirky as an animated feature can get, Rango might just shake loose Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks’ shared choke hold on the market. Equal parts Sergio Leone, John Ford, Terry Gilliam, and Salvador Dali, it’s also likely to be the best animated surrealistic western-spoof about a lizard suffering an identity crisis you’ll ever see.The titular hero (voiced by the always daring, always intriguing Johnny Depp) is a chameleon wiling away his hours in a terrarium by staging plays with his “friends”: a plastic palm tree, a Barbie doll torso, and a wind-up fish. A twist of fate leaves him stranded in the middle of the desert and pursued by a hungry hawk. Rango soon winds up in the frontier town of Dirt and, after a few acts of unintended heroism, he is quickly made the town’s new sheriff.
Dirt is in a sorry state of affairs due to a assorted marauders and a dwindling water supply. In one of Rango’s loopiest cinematic homages (and that’s saying a lot in regards to a movie that features an aerial assault by bats choreographed to a Morricone-esque version of “The Ride of the Valkyries”) the town’s lead villain and his plot are straight out of Chinatown.
Screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) and director Gore Verbinski (the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) keep the story freewheeling and unapologetically original for the duration of its 105 runtime, successfully skewering the spaghetti western up to and including an encounter between Rango and “the Spirit of the West” (Timothy Olyphant, doing an eerily convincing Clint Eastwood impersonation).
It should be noted that Rango is likely to be too intense, too long, and too high-falutin’ for kids under eight; kids of all other ages (including us full-grown ones) are sure to enjoy it.
Catch Rango at NorthPark, Galaxy or Studio Movie Grill — details here.
