Great looking, decent story, but could stand to be funnier

Rating: 7/10 (6 March 2011)

Worth seeing mostly for the visuals. It's awesome how bizarre these characters are. I sincerely hope they frighten children (reports from the movie's message board say that there were a lot of young children weeping when the rattlesnake character appears). Animated films are often far too cutesy, and this is a breath of fresh air in that way. The story is not especially great, but it's passable. It's a Western about a pet chameleon (voiced (kind of poorly) by Johnny Depp) who gets lost in the Mojave and ends up in a small town. After some accidental heroics, he becomes sheriff. A local lizard girl (voiced (quite well) by Isla Fisher) persuades him to look into the current drought after she finds evidence of water being dumped in the middle of the desert. If that sounds familiar, it's because that whole mystery plot is cribbed from Chinatown. That doesn't bother me at all, and the mystery is relatively complex for a kid's movie. My major complaint about Rango is that the humor very rarely works. The script is just not very funny. If it wasn't supposed to be, that would be fine, but they're clearly going for laughs (and failing).