Now for something topical! A fifteen-year-old review of Rango

 I originally wrote this review for Geek Speak in 2011. I tried to be good about not double posting if I was writing somewhere else. I didn't want to steal their traffic. (I'd typically just post a link.)  However, Geek Speak has long since folded, so I figured I might as well post this here. If you were wondering what I thought of Rango fifteen years ago, wonder no more! 

Rango

Fifteen minutes could save you 15% on your car insurance

I was pleased to be the one to review Rango because it got me a night at the movies with my kid  (My wife was pleased as well because it got her a night to herself. Everybody wins on movie night!)

We went to our local theater and got there in time for the coming attractions. Coming soon to a theater near you:

• Born to be Wild: Cute baby Animals! In 3-D!
• Puss in Boots- The length of the Shrek series is out of proportion with my interest in it. In 3-D!
• Kung Fu Panda 2: The Dreamsworks Face! In 3-D!
• Smurfs: My childhood dies! In 3-D!

And then there was Rango. We open on an owl mariachi band, which is, by definition, awesome. I firmly believe that there does not exist a movie that cannot be improved by the presence of an owl mariachi band.

We then cut to our nameless chameleon, hamming it up in a one-man play with some toys while in a car with a human family. But there is a near accident and the chameleon and his terrarium are thrown from the family car. He briefly winds up on the windshield of a car driven by someone who looks an awful lot like Hunter S. Thompson, which was an awesome cameo, because Depp played Thompson in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I really like the design on Rango. I had never owned a chameleons and I had to ask myself do they really look that freaky? The internet says yes!

Look at those bug eyes, man!

He meets an Armadillo with the voice of an octopus (Specifically "Doctor" Octopus, Alfred Molina) a combination certain to give taxonomists fits for years to come and is told to seek the Spirit of the West.

He has a surreal series of dreams overnight involving his experiences and then runs into Beans. I didn't know what kind of animal she was supposed to be while watching the movie but the promotional materials assure me that she's a desert iguana.  Whatever she is, she needs to cut back on the sodium.

Our still nameless Chameleon enters the town of Dirt, where he decides that nobody knows him here, he can reinvent himself, and he does, taking on the identity of the hard-drinking, tough-talking, straight-shooting Rango with chameleon-like ease.

Through a series of misadventures, Rango winds up defending Dirt against the hawk that haunts the town. I thought this was a really well done sequence, with the filmmakers doing an excellent job of depicting the difference in scale between the tiny Rango and the much larger bird. There is also an amusing bit where Rango hides inside a vending machine, which makes an ideal fortress...until the hawk finds a quarter and drops it in a slot. Rango can't bring himself to shoot the hawk, so he aims at random, and kills the hawk when his ricocheting bullet drops a water tower on top of it. For his, uh, heroism, he's promoted to Sheriff by the evil Mayor (Ned Beatty).

And boy, you'd think that someone as infatuated with the concept of theater as Rango would recognize a villain when he sees one. It's a shame that tortoises can't grow a mustache, because twirling it would have given him something to do with his hands. And I guess that's kind of an itty bitty spoiler, which I try to avoid in my reviews, but the mayor was obviously the villain from the start. The big surprise would have been if the mayor were anything but the villain.

We follow Rango the sheriff around for a while, and he has a charming goofy enthusiasm for the job matched only by his utter incompetence at it. Eventually the water bank is robbed, leaving the impoverished town even more parched. Rango organizes a posse and they find the robbers. There follows an ambush, a reversal, a lengthy chase scene and a couple chords of the Ride of the Valkyries on a banjo, which is just neat! The action sequence was characteristic of those in the movie, very quick moving but also very easy to follow. I wish more live action movies would film action sequences this tight.

They arrest the bank robbers and take them in, though they protest that the water was already gone by the time they found the bottle. Nobody's sure what's going on (hint: the mayor is what's going on), but they take the water thieves back to town.

Rango confronts Mayor McEvil about his evil, but doesn't have any proof. The mayor decides to call in Rattlesnake Jake to rid him of this meddlesome sheriff.

Jake slithers into town and he's downright terrifying, just endless miles of coiled menace, blood-red eyes, and some kind of gatling gun for a rattle. He's voiced by Bill Nighy, cementing the impression of evil incarnate. He scared my four-year-old child He scared me!

He sees Rango for the fraud he is and intimidates him into admitting the whole masquerade and then runs him out of town.  Rango finally gets to the other side of the road, where he meets Roland Deschain, Clint Eastwood, the Spirit of the West in a scene that was quite a bit too cutesy and self-referential for my tastes. (Specifically, the idea of the Man with No Name riding around in a golf cart full of Oscars)

No-Name tells Rango that he can't just walk out of his own story, and this inspires Rango to make things right. TV Tropes calls it "becoming the mask". You probably know the concept, if perhaps not the name, where the character who was trying to pull off a con finds redemption by embracing the ideals of the identity he was faking.

The problem is resolved about like you'd expect. Rango rides back into town, there is a confrontation, Mayor McEvil is evil and he dies in such a way that doesn't require Rango to compromise his values.

The movie got made because Gore Verbinski wanted to do a "small film" between films #212 and #213 in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Johnny Depp had 20 days to kill. Overall? It's not bad. Johnny Depp can usually be relied upon to give a quality performance, and whatever problems the film has, it's not with his performance. It's a somewhat above average CG adventure story.  It never reaches the heights of Up! or becomes as incredible as the Incredibles, but it's a cute little flick for kids and for adults who don't mind hearing paraphrased Rango quotes for the next six weeks from their kids.