Karma Chameleon

Rango

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Gore Verbinski

Featuring the Voice Talents of: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Bill Nighy, Ned Beatty and Abigail Breslin

Running time: 107 minutes

The jokes in Rango are refreshingly crass, the protagonist is an existentialist, the action sequences are archaically violent and the characters smoke and liquor up as often as they speak. One even walks around with an arrow thrust through his eye socket. This may be an animated western, but the emphasis is firmly on the “western” half.

A hybrid of Johnny Depp’s colourful zaniness with Sergio Leone’s iconography, Rango breathes to life in an environment that is simultaneously breezy and dark. It’s a film that feels like it’s 90% Wile E. Coyote and 10% Hunter S. Thompson (whose Raoul Duke makes a brief cameo early on, this being a Johnny Depp feature).

Our cowboy hero is a charismatic chameleon voiced by Depp. Wide-eyed and donned in a red Hawaiian shirt, he performs many tall tales in a terrarium tank – like a quirky, classically trained version of the Geico mascot. When the tank falls out of his owner's van and shatters, he finds himself stranded in the middle of the sun-baked Mojave Desert.

He finds a small shanty-town named Dirt in the middle of the dry wilderness. An outsider in the savage village, he is warned by a little mole (Abigail Breslin) that he is not welcome in town and that death awaits him.

Regardless, upon entering Dirt’s saloon, our chameleon uses his bravado acting experience to forge a bold tale about his adventures as a gunslinger. He is cheered by the townspeople (well, towns-creatures) and adopts the name Rango – or as the residents eventually call him, Sheriff Rango.

But, there’s trouble in the West, as Dirt's water reserves are dripping away dangerously fast. A feisty, bug-eyed frontier gal, Beans (Isla Fisher), is horrified to think what a wasteland without water could hold for her poor father’s ranch.

Rango speaks to Dirt’s shifty mayor (voiced by Ned Beatty, with a smooth Southern drawl purposefully akin to John Huston’s from the similarly-themed noir Chinatown) to persuade him to spread the water amongst the town’s citizens and help out Beans.

What follows is a wickedly funny and wonderfully offbeat adventure where Rango and his compadres journey further into the wild west to fetch some liquid for the community. The gang is accompanied by a mariachi band of owls, a form of Greek chorus that forewarns of dark days ahead.

Rango made me harken back to 1998’s Antz, which also featured adult themes amidst childish slapstick, sly, sophisticated dialogue, and a diverse palette of stunningly designed settings.

It is the first animated film by the special effects wizards from Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Staying true to the qualities that ILM founder George Lucas often brings to his films, the creatures’ designs are usually more layered than their own personalities, save the protagonist.

The film’s central action set-piece, a thrilling chase scene with Dirt’s citizens fleeing an army of mad, tyrannical rodents (which directly homages Lucas’s own Star Wars) is arresting. The sequence raises the stakes for what a chase scene can offer in terms of visual dazzle, and with the limitations of the PG rating with its pervasive gun-slinging.

Rango may be stuffed to the brim with allusions to classic films (from High Noon to Apocalypse Now), but it rarely feels slacken in its storytelling. John Logan's (Gladiator, The Aviator) wry script takes advantage of the animated format to offer fresh variations on the conventions of the western genre - from the loopy, insatiably weird protagonist to the cheeky slapstick situations.

The storytelling is also rather impressive since it treats a dark and dire impending tragedy with a tongue stuck firmly in its cheek. Rango walks by a cemetery where past sheriffs have gone to rest, and the gravestone reads: “Thurs. – Sat.”

Later, when he casually asks Dirt’s citizens if they have guns to defend themselves, everyone whips out a pistol – even the little ones. This bizarre balance of dark and light humour is one of the film’s most wicked delights.

Rango is the first mainstream release of 2011 that’s worth handing over a fistful of dollars for – with no extra, desperation-reeking 3D surcharge, either. It’s interesting to note that the two biggest blockbusters of the last few months – this and True Grit – stem from the same genre. I guess all is no longer quiet on the western front.