Best of 2011: #7 Rango

This was a strange film. 

Let me try to describe it for those who haven't seen it.  Imagine that Coen Brothers took over Pixar, then watched a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies while eating some bad pizza and then wrote down the plot to the dreams they had that night.  The movie resulting from this hypothetical dream-script would likely resemble Rango.



This a movie so witty, weird, and oddly subversive that it's surprising that it got such a wide release.  This isn't the type of movie that studios typically bet on.  Offhand, I have no idea how well it did at the box office.  Let me check...it made $123 million domestically and was the 21st highest grossing movie of the year.  Not bad, I suppose.  Not earth-shattering, like the vastly inferior Cars 2, but pretty good.  Maybe there's hope for humanity after all.

The first thing you'll notice when you watch Rango -- and I'm assuming you all will watch it after reading this review -- is that, like many an animated film, the characters are all talking animals, but, unlike really no other animated film, the animals are all ugly.  It's not that they're poorly drawn, quite the opposite actually.  Each character is rendered with exquisite, uncanny detail. No, the animals are just ugly, purposefully so.  The title character has tiny little eyes and a crooked neck.  There's a bird walking around with an arrow through his eye.  You can see crusties in some of the animals' fur.  You get the idea...it's awesome.

The second thing you'll notice, particularly if you're a movie lover, is that Rango is really an homage to classic movies.  Sure, sure, it's ostensibly a spaghetti western.  But, that's not all.  The plot is basically the same as that of Chinatown.  There are direct references to Blazing Saddles, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now, among others.  Again...awesome.  

As for the story, Rango, voiced by Johnny Depp, is a lizard, I'm not exactly sure what kind.  In the beginning of the movie, he's a pet, living in terrarium, with not contact with the outside world.  His only friends are a wind-up fish and a headless, legless Barbie doll.  At this point, he doesn't even technically have a name left. In the very first scene, the terrarium is thrown from a moving car, leaving Rango stranded at the side of the road, forcing him to travel through the desert. 

Though this is Rango's first time out in the world, he's had an active imagination, allowing him to play a number of roles and be a number of people, but only for his inanimate.  Yet, once he stumbles into Dirt, a tiny town inhabited by other ugly animals, he is forced to pick a persona and decide, once and for all, who he is.  It's then that he picks the name Rango and when he begins to portray himself as a loner, a killer, a "man with no name,"so to speak.  Of course, he has neither the skills nor the innate bravery to live up to his chosen persona, but it'll take a while for people to realize that.

The closest parallel I can draw to Rango's character is Ulysses Everett McGill, George Clooney's character from O Brother Where Art Thou.  He's fast talking with a broad vocabulary and what appears to be an extensive knowledge of art and culture...extensive for a lizard, anyway.  But, ultimately he's short on actual brains.  

And, hilarity ensues.  There's really not much use in delving further into the plot.  The story is secondary to the overall insane tone of the film.  The dialogue is as brilliant as it gets.  And, while the non-Rango characters are all classic western stock characters, some with recognizable voices, others not so recognizable,  they are all nearly as hilarious as he is.

One interesting factoid about the movie is that the director -- Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame -- actually recorded the voices while the characters acted out the scenes on a sound stage and then used those films as inspiration for the animators. Now, I don't know enough about filmmaking to know whether that made a difference in the film.  I just thought that was a neat tidbit of information.

Anyway, some of you may have heard some negative things about Rango and have avoided it on that basis.  But, I'm fairly sure most of the negative reviews have come from parents who watched it with their kids.  That's not surprising.  It's not necessarily a movie for kids.  It's not bad or anything, they just aren't likely to get it.

But, you're all adults, I'm assuming.  So...go watch this movie.