Reunited from their days aboard The Black Pearl, Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski embark on an altogether different mission: a bonkers Wild West tale about an existentialist chameleon with a Buzz Lightyear complex that bumbles across the screen in beautifully rendered and refreshingly 3-D free CGI.
Encased within the solitude of your typical pet shop tank, Rango (Depp) is a dreamer who spends his days directing inanimate objects in make-believe theatrical productions. Occasionally the reality of his situation pierces his psyche and he asks “who am I?”. The answer is thrust upon him when his glass prison is shattered all over the highway in a wonderful, ‘Ave Maria’ accompanied prologue, forcing him to integrate with the menagerie of creatures who live in the small town of Dirt. It’s time for Rango to put on the performance of his life.
The main problem with Rango is that it’s just plain dull. Despite all of the initial intrigue in our kaleidoscopic hero, and the odd titter about his mother’s “active social life”, it becomes tediously flabby.
There are too many plot twists, too many Depp indulging monologues that grate with his drawn out colourful vocabulary, and some uninspired direction that manages to make the potentially frantic wagon chases and pistols at dawn, utterly mundane.
Reminiscent of The Fantastic Mr Fox, you’re also left unsure as to who this is aimed at. Some of the characters, though wonderfully designed, are either weirdly eccentric, or in the case of Bill Nighy’s devilishly voiced Rattlesnake Jake, a big kid-scaring serpent.
There are also a couple of too-risqué jokes that, albeit funny, in a film marketed towards the youngsters are the kind of sledgehammer subtle adult jokes that you wouldn’t find PIXAR resorting to.
For all of the fumbled action sequences, Verbinski gets the remainder of the dust smothered visuals right: there are a number of dreamscape sequences that are breathtaking to watch, like animated shorts within the feature. A very dark moment finds our introspective chameleon crossing a busy road at night. It is a staggeringly good scene which yanks you from the boredom and makes you care about this little green fella for the first time, and it’s also worth mentioning that Rango is completely mute during this bit.
That’s not to say Depp is bad at the voice duties, he employs all of his pantomime schtick that we’ve come to expect from his more recent, flamboyant performances. It’s just that a stricter editor may have reigned in the performance with more effective results.
We are in something of a golden era for animation (the last being Disney circa Beauty and the Beast) so it’s surprising to watch this dud of a fun vacuum unfold. At least its appeal will be universal, in that both children and adults alike will be bored to tears by it.
[etRating value=“ 2”]
Encased within the solitude of your typical pet shop tank, Rango (Depp) is a dreamer who spends his days directing inanimate objects in make-believe theatrical productions. Occasionally the reality of his situation pierces his psyche and he asks “who am I?”. The answer is thrust upon him when his glass prison is shattered all over the highway in a wonderful, ‘Ave Maria’ accompanied prologue, forcing him to integrate with the menagerie of creatures who live in the small town of Dirt. It’s time for Rango to put on the performance of his life.
The main problem with Rango is that it’s just plain dull. Despite all of the initial intrigue in our kaleidoscopic hero, and the odd titter about his mother’s “active social life”, it becomes tediously flabby.
There are too many plot twists, too many Depp indulging monologues that grate with his drawn out colourful vocabulary, and some uninspired direction that manages to make the potentially frantic wagon chases and pistols at dawn, utterly mundane.
Reminiscent of The Fantastic Mr Fox, you’re also left unsure as to who this is aimed at. Some of the characters, though wonderfully designed, are either weirdly eccentric, or in the case of Bill Nighy’s devilishly voiced Rattlesnake Jake, a big kid-scaring serpent.
There are also a couple of too-risqué jokes that, albeit funny, in a film marketed towards the youngsters are the kind of sledgehammer subtle adult jokes that you wouldn’t find PIXAR resorting to.
For all of the fumbled action sequences, Verbinski gets the remainder of the dust smothered visuals right: there are a number of dreamscape sequences that are breathtaking to watch, like animated shorts within the feature. A very dark moment finds our introspective chameleon crossing a busy road at night. It is a staggeringly good scene which yanks you from the boredom and makes you care about this little green fella for the first time, and it’s also worth mentioning that Rango is completely mute during this bit.
That’s not to say Depp is bad at the voice duties, he employs all of his pantomime schtick that we’ve come to expect from his more recent, flamboyant performances. It’s just that a stricter editor may have reigned in the performance with more effective results.
We are in something of a golden era for animation (the last being Disney circa Beauty and the Beast) so it’s surprising to watch this dud of a fun vacuum unfold. At least its appeal will be universal, in that both children and adults alike will be bored to tears by it.
[etRating value=“ 2”]
