Reviews > Movie Reviews > Rango…

The studio was so happy with an early sequence in which the spindly, loose-limbed chameleon – voiced by Johnny Depp – is chased through the desert by a hawk that it put it out as a teaser over a year ago.

Good news: the film lives up to the trailer. If we weren’t forced to judge every animated film by the impossibly high standards of Pixar, this would score higher still.

The CG animation (in glorious 2D!) is breathtakingly sharp. By the end of the year electronics stores around the country will be playing blu-rays of Rango ad nauseam to show off their HD monster screens. The reptile’s eyes – protruding from his head and more limber than a teenage gymnast –are so marvelously expressive the movie doesn’t need 3D. But that’s nothing compared to the myriad textures of skin, fur and hide that make up the townsfolk of Dirt, Nevada, an Old West outpost smack in the middle of the desert. These critters – reptiles and rodents, moles, foxes, even an armadillo – are trying to eke out a nineteenth century pioneer existence, but a severe drought threatens to turn Dirt into a dust bowl.

Rango is not from around these parts. In fact that’s not even his name (he doesn’t have one), just an alias he picks to impress the locals. He’s a tenderfoot from the East, dropped into the desert in a freak road accident. Being a chameleon, naturally he suffers from an identity crisis, low-self-esteem, and a penchant for amateur dramatics – a theatrical bent he has exploited in the past to ward off loneliness.

Finding himself labeled a freak among the cowpokes, he assimilates in a hurry, taking on the character of a tough gunfighter, legendary for having killed the Jenkins brothers – all seven of them – with one bullet.

After fortuitously getting the better of the terrifying hawk, Rango is handed the sheriff’s badge by the mayor, a giant turtle (voiced by Ned Beatty). But even the newly empowered and (over-) confidant chameleon will have his work cut out for him getting to the bottom of the town’s water shortage.

Like The Fantastic Mr Fox, Rango is directed by a filmmaker who has previously worked in live action – in this case, Gore Verbinski – and it benefits from his attention to the visual atmosphere of the piece. Verbinski brought on True Grit DP Roger Deakins as a visual consultant, and it shows.

The obvious influence is Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western (you’ll remember that before he made the Pirates of the Caribbean movies with Depp, Verbinski made The Mexican, a caper with Leonesque flourishes). But as well as the baroque panache of the spaghettis, the film also harks back to the slapstick comedy of Bob Hope in The Paleface and Buster Keaton in Go West. There’s a hilarious sequence in which Rango inadvertently sets fire to a bully by the name of Bad Bill (Ray Winstone) that Keaton would have been proud of.

Meanwhile John Logan’s script cheerfully rips off Robert Towne’s classic Chinatown. (There’s also cheeky homage to Depp’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which isn’t something you expect to find in family entertainment.)

That sense of mischief, dynamic action scenes and the plethora of clever touches – the animals ride on roadrunners instead of horses – combine to make Rango a winner, even though the last act is needlessly over-elaborated and despite a couple of iffy voice casting choices. I wasn’t convinced by Isla Fischer’s decision to play love interest Beans with a thick hick accent, and suspect an American might have had more fun with Rattlesnake Jake than Bill Nighy managed.

You won’t come away moved, either, but for most of its running time Rango is a real humdinger.