Thespians? That's illegal in seven states!

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2012)

References abound in "Rango", Gore Verbinski's animated film about a chameleon who saves a small desert town from an evil, water hoarding land baron. Nods to Peckinpah and Leone fly left, right and centre, the film's title alludes to Sergio Corbicci's "Django" spaghetti Westerns, the film's plot is a mutation of "Chinatown" and "Blazing Saddles", and the film as a whole is mostly an excuse for constant visual and aural references to past films and/or moments/gags extracted from Western popular culture (everything from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" to the unmade "Don Quixote"). "Rango's" less a film than a postmodern junkyard.
The film pretends to be about self-deception and the search for authenticity, our colour-shifting chameleon desperate to find his "true identity", but it's not. Our hero decides his place in the world before entering it, and the world obediently reverse engineers itself to conform to his cosy desires. Rango wants to be a hero, wants to be mythologized, a fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy which the film unwaveringly facilitates. Incidentally, the chameleon is voice-acted by Johnny Depp, an actor who likes to think of himself as a real life chameleon.
Like most big budget animated films, "Rango" is slick, amusing, hyper-fine-tuned but disposable. Still, several of the film's action scenes generate a buzz, particularly a late chase sequence, in which cowboys flying bats chase a waggon. It's a very cool sequence. The film's secondary characters are also well designed: they're a bunch of mean faces, old timers, bandits and sun parched rascals. Unfortunately the film's villain is cliché and its narrative arc wholly formulaic, right down to our hero's obligatory last moment crisis of self-belief. For slightly better recent, made-by-committee animations, see "Megamind", "Tangled", "Battle for Terra" and "How To Train Your Dragon". For more substantial recent auteur projects, see Mamoru Oshii's "The Sky Crawlers", Studio Ghibli's "The Secret World of Arrietty", "Perfect Blue" and Chomet's "The Illusionist".
7.5/10 – Worth one viewing.