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.