Charlie Dorf
Arts and Entertainment Editor
I’m a sucker for Westerns. Be it a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) or a Joss Weadon space Western (Serenity), I have probably seen it multiple times. Going in to Rango, I was afraid that the film would turn my beloved genre into a hackneyed kids movie, making a mockery of everything Leone and Eastwood built to make the western what it is today. I was happily proven wrong.
A throwback to the westerns of Leone, complete with gunfights, cigars and showdowns, Rango is by no means a simple kids movie. In fact, many of the film’s jokes would be lost on a younger audience. A good combination of goofy humor, clever writing and amazing animation puts Rango somewhere between Blazing Saddles and Silverado, giving its story and characters depth while at the same time remaining lighthearted.
The story follows Rango (Johnny Depp), a pet chameleon accidentally stranded on the side of a highway. Rango finds his way to the town of Dirt, a Old West town populated by a wide assortment of creatures, from desert iguana (and love interest) Bean (Isla Fisher), turtle Mayor John (Ned Beatty) and malevolent Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy). The town is running out of water and, after he accidentally kills the hawk terrorizing the town, appoints Rango as sheriff to find out why. What follows are several epic gunfights and action set pieces, including an army of moles riding birds mounted with gatling gun.
The first thing that happily surprised me about the film was the frequency and use of firearms, as expected in a normal western but not necessarily an animated one rated PG. However, gun battles occur often, with characters being shot and sometimes killed. This came as a pleasant surprise, especially in a time where police officers’ guns in E.T. are digitally replaced by walkie-talkies or where Harvey Weinstein is making a PG-13 version of The King’s Speech. The film’s more mature air gave me a lot of respect for director Gore Verbinski, who created a good movie instead of a simply making a kid’s one.
The writing also took both a goofy but effective style, injecting a very classic Old-West feel into the dialogue while constantly adding silly, but not necessarily childish, humor. The characters are also thoroughly developed, with each character, even the small ones, having their own distinct personality, achieved through a combination of different animal species and individualized writing. The detail of the animation and the precision of the voice acting creates a splendid degree of believability, as you are able to detect so much from every character’s meticulously planned expressions. For me, the diversity of the different characters made me like this film even more than some older Westerns, where many characters seem to fall into two or three archetypes. Here, each character feels distinct from those around him or her, and often poke fun at the various common archetypes (i.e. – the drunken doctor, the scheming mayor etc.). Also, I can legitimately say Bill Nighy’s Rattlesnake Jake is terrifying, and I never say that about an animated villain.
The story is not particularly outstanding, but it serves as an effective means of keeping the action and the characters moving. Though no scenes had me choked up, the film does a very good job of making you “feel” the story as well as watch it. This is helped along by an excellent soundtrack and score. Overall, Rango is a very good Western, and adults and teens should not shy away, as its advertisements promise a kids movie when in reality, the film is geared towards adults as much, if not more, than kids.
