Review: Rango

Grade: A

Upsides: Original, clever and visually dazzling with a shockingly deep plot that tips its hat to revisionist Westerns and Gonzo Journalism

Downsides: Realistically detailed creatures, some rough language and a heavy plot might scare, confuse and bore the youngest viewers

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Why did the chameleon cross the road?

No ideas?

How about to find himself?

Gore Verbinski’s Rango offers one of the deepest punch lines to a chicken-cross-the-road joke all wrapped in the most original and subversive animated feature to emerge from a studio not named Pixar. Raoul Duke would be proud. Coincidentally, Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego and his compadre, Dr. Gonzo, make a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in early goings, a clear tip of the hat to star Johnny Depp’s legendary turn as Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In many ways, Rango is a spiritual and visual cousin to the Fear and Loathing, right down to spastic chameleon Rango’s red Hawaiian print shirt.

Rango is a fever dream twist on classic westerns, spiked with existential dilemmas and the orneriest collection of humanized critters this side of a Disney flick. The animated epic follows the titular chameleon as he is thrown from his life as a caged pet with dreams of starring in his own story and is forced to live the role he was born to play. That role just happens to be sheriff of the dying western hamlet of Dirt, where the denizens---including all manner of lizard, rodent, feline and rabbit—are struggling to survive amidst a mysterious drought, outlaws, cannibals and the shrinking border of the ‘west’. Despite some mildly predictable plot elements, Rango tackles everything from the death of the old west to the actor’s search for identity and the importance of the audience to the storyteller—including a Greek chorus of Mariachi Owls—with cleverness and personality, proving itself so much more than a fish out of water story with talking animals it seems to be.

Star Johnny Depp knocks it out the park, as usual, voicing the conflicted Rango with his trademark buzzed mania, self-awareness and pitch perfect comic timing. He hits many of the same beats from Fear and Loathing, but his voice work succeeds largely due to the fresh context. The rest of the cast is no slouch either. Isla Fisher voices Annie Oakley-ish lizard Beans with pure spunk, while Abigail Breslin turns in a creepy, smart-alecky turn as field mouse Priscilla. Ned Beatty lends a gruff world-weariness to the treacherous Mayor, and Johnny Depp encounters Davy Jones again as Bill Nighy voices the machine-gun-tailed rattler from hell, Rattlesnake Jake. There’s even another surprise character cameo that’s sure to please Spaghetti Western fans.

Visually, Rango is amazing. The creatures of Dirt are not only painstakingly and realistically detailed, each has a unique physical deformity or signature that shows how much living these characters have done. The shots of the desert and Rango’s hallucinations are an awesome balance of majesty and mystery. Verbinski and the animators at Industrial Light & Magic proceed to outdo their work on the characters and scenery by staging some ridiculously elaborate action sequences—complete with dive bombing bats and machine-gunning rabbit cannibals—that exceed the limits of spectacle and imagination in most computer animated features.

Despite all of its distilled greatness, Rango may not play well to kids under ten, as many of creatures are appropriately frightening and the language can be coarse (hey, it’s a western. Tough talk is unavoidable). Not to mention, most of the existentialist and post-modern western themes are bound to fly right over their heads. While the kids may not get everything that’s going on, they’ll still be mesmerized by the dazzling visuals and slapstick shenanigans that punctuate the deeper storyline. Even if the kids don’t have fun with this trippy revisionist Western, fans of post-modern Westerns and complex, humorous epics in the vein of Verbinski’s and Depp’s last collaboration—something about pirates—are sure to have one heck of a good time.

Review: Drive Angry 3D

Grade: C

Upside: Visceral gory action and gratuitous nudity, with sly self-awareness, that's sure to please fans of 21st century grindhouse flicks like Machete.

Downside: Generally unoriginal with archetypal characters and falls flat when trying to add any depth.

I can imagine the pitch for Summit Entertainment's new Nicolas Cage vehicle, Drive Angry (Shot in 3D!): 21st Century Grindhouse! It’s The Crow meets Death Proof!

Tarantino would’ve killed to direct this in his heyday.

Unfortunately, the duty of directing one of the purest examples of 70’s era B-movie schlock in years falls to Direct-to-DVD vet Patrick Lussier. In Drive Angry, Lussier directs Nicolas Cage through ridiculously violent and brazen revenge fantasy. Cage plays the cleverly—to some—named John Milton, an escapee from Hell dead set on saving his granddaughter from slimy six-gun slinging Satanist Jonah King (Twilight’s Billy Burke). Milton is accompanied on his roaring rampage of vengeance by Amber Heard’s Piper, a Southern-fried pistol and dead ringer for Friday Night Lights’ Tyra Collette. Tailing Milton and Piper is a snarky soul collector known only as the Accountant, played by perennial ‘That Guy’ William Fichtner with his usual ticks turned up to 100.

Fichtner is not the only one who has turned the intensity up for this flick. Everything about Drive Angry is beyond over-the-top. From the cartoonish violence to the abundant nudity, this flick operates almost exclusively on Badass Logic and slavishly follows the Rule of Cool. Whether this works largely depends on your taste and tolerance for the hallowed conventions of grindhouse cinema. Taken at face value, Drive Angry’s hard ‘R’ qualities—including gunshots to the eye, a shootout during sex (ripped straight from another 21st century big budget B-movie, 2007’s Shoot’em Up) and a plethora of limbs destroyed by buck shots—could be appalling. Thankfully, the makers of Drive Angry don’t take the material seriously and the sly awareness of the flick’s B-movie roots makes it more digestible than it has any right to be.

The performances, on the other hand, are much harder to swallow. Cage hams it up, as usual, with his trademark stilted delivery that ranges from quirky cool to laughably explosive. Heard fares a little better, playing Piper with just the right amount of spunk of vulnerability to avoid be grating. Burke and Fichtner do serviceable jobs as antagonists, but neither brings anything original to characters that most audiences have seen before, which is the main problem with Drive Angry.

There’s nothing new here. Lussier does competent work that is at times thrilling, but is mostly a series of shots, characters and plot points that even the most casual moviegoers would recognize. One would think that with carte blanche to go balls-to-the-wall Lussier and his team would be a bit more creative. If Lussier couldn’t give the flick a bit more originality, at least he could’ve given it some depth. Sadly, anytime Drive Angry tries to switch gears and show some character growth or even something resembling real emotion, it falls flat. Trust me, it’s never a good sign when the audience laughs at the most dramatic scenes. Despite these failings, Drive Angry succeeds in being exactly what it seems to be on the tin: a total turn-off-your-brain experience in 3D(which is noticeably clearer and more effective than recent 3D releases, thanks to some cool effects with objects shooting towards the audience). If you can manage to ignore the B-movie styling, unoriginal characters and rehashed plot, or you just love movies like Machete or Death Proof then Drive Angry is right up your alley. If not, it’d be your best interest to drive away from this undercooked revenge flick.