Rango is an animated fiction and fantasy that sends chills on your body .Never in the history of the animated movies had there been a touching pet story as Rango.
Rango—unrecognizably but aptly voiced by Johnny Depp, himself a chameleon—is an every-lizard who, after a cross-country car mishap, finds himself stranded in the contemporary Southwest. There, with the help of a rancher's-daughter iguana named Beans (Isla Fisher), he finds himself in Dirt, a town that time forgot. After convincing the Old West-style denizens that he's a rootin'-tootin' gunslinger, Rango is made a figurehead sheriff by the avuncular old Tortoise John (Ned Beatty, channeling John Huston right down to his monologue on water and the future). But things in Dirt are dirty, and soon Rango's gotta do what a reptile's gotta do. Which would be easier if he had any idea what he was doing.
Director Gore Verbinski, working in animation for the first time—though his
Mouse Hunt and
Pirates of the Caribbean films are more or less live-action cartoons—grasps both the painterly possibilities of expressionistic vistas and the tick-tock timing of slapstick: A scene between Rango, burping fire after drinking firewater, and Bad Bill (Ray Winstone), an implacable, antagonistic gila monster getting said fire in the face, bears the unmistakable stamp of Warner Bros. great Chuck Jones, whom the Industrial Light & Magic animators clearly bow to, as well they should. Given that, it's not surprising to see road runners used as horses here, though the filmmakers are wise enough not to hammer on that point with a "beep! beep!" There's a fine line between homage and awful, after all—one sublimely seen with what eventually turns out to be a rather Wile E. Coyote hawk.
Rango treads that line straight and true. In addition to its identity comedy comes an identity crisis. In addition to drawing-room murder mystery (How does someone drown in a desert? Hmm…), come remarkable set-pieces, including one long, kinetic sequence straight out of
The Road Warrior. Principal screenwriter John Logan (
Gladiator, the planned 2012 James Bond film) balances all this and more without it becoming a tiresome mishmash or derivative hokum—indeed, the film reaches moments of grace that a couple of minor plot holes don't sully.
This is a movie that could be enjoyed by the child and the adult alike and what more one needs for a saturday matinee?
