Rango opens on a chameleon in a vivarium, performing scenes for an audience of a plastic palm tree and a wind-up fish. It is a joke about a lizard with no one to watch him. It is also, by the end of Gore Verbinski’s film, the whole thesis.
The chameleon gets his audience. He gets too much of it.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers.
A Vivarium, a Car Crash, and the Mojave Desert
The setup is quick and mean. The vivarium falls out of his owners’ car on a Mojave highway. The cause of the crash is an armadillo hermit named Roadkill, crossing the road in search of a mystical being called the “Spirit of the West.” Roadkill points the chameleon toward Dirt, a frontier town of animals.
Before he reaches it, a red-tailed hawk nearly kills him. He meets Beans, a desert iguana rancher, who brings him into town. Asked who he is, he invents a tough drifter named Rango.
That invention is the engine of the film. Rango is a performance that keeps having to be renewed.
Johnny Depp Plays a Lizard Playing a Man
Depp voices Rango, and the casting is the joke and the craft at once. This is a pet who has spent his life doing bits, now doing a bit for his life. Verbinski directed Depp through the Pirates films, and Rango leans on that history without quoting it.
The supporting cast is deep and specific. Isla Fisher is Beans, the rancher who wants the water investigated. Ned Beatty is the elderly tortoise mayor. Bill Nighy is Rattlesnake Jake, the gunslinger the town fears will return now that the hawk is dead. Abigail Breslin is Priscilla. Alfred Molina is Roadkill. Stephen Root voices Doc, Merrimack and Mr. Snuggles. Harry Dean Stanton is Balthazar. Timothy Olyphant is the Spirit of the West. Ray Winstone is Bad Bill, Ian Abercrombie is Ambrose, Gil Birmingham is Wounded Bird.
That is a lot of names for a cartoon about a lizard. The film earns them.
Dirt Has a Water Problem, and It Is Not a Metaphor
Dirt is in a severe drought. Beans demands Rango investigate the missing water. He does, and immediately makes it worse: he mistakes the mole bandit Balthazar for a prospector and helps him steal what water the town has left.
Rango raises a posse. They find banker Johannes Merrimack III dead — drowned, oddly enough, in a desert. They track Balthazar to his hideout, fight his bat-riding clan over the stolen water container, and find it already empty. Balthazar and his prairie dog sons, Jedidiah and Ezekiel, are taken into custody. They insist it was empty when they got it.
Rango starts to suspect the shortage is not a shortage. The film is careful here. It lets the audience arrive at the answer alongside him rather than ahead of him, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be.
A Western That Knows Exactly What It Is Stealing From
Rango wears its influences openly. The film references The Shakiest Gun in the West, A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West and Cat Ballou. It also pulls from outside the genre: Chinatown, Raising Arizona, El Topo and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The Chinatown lift is the load-bearing one, because the water plot is the Chinatown plot. A town’s scarcity is somebody’s business model. Rango understands that a Western about water is a Western about power, and it does not soften the point for a family audience.
The animation was outsourced to Industrial Light & Magic. The character design is deliberately ugly — cracked skin, bad teeth, dust in everything. This is not a pretty movie and does not want to be.
The Tagline Is Doing More Work Than Taglines Usually Do
“No man can walk out on his own story.” That is the film’s tagline, and unusually for a tagline, it is a real idea rather than a slogan. Rango cannot stop being Rango once the town believes him. The lie becomes a role, and the role becomes an obligation.
The script, by John Logan with Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit, keeps testing that. Every time Rango tries to slip out of the character, the town hands him back his own legend. The hawk he killed by accident becomes a deliberate act. The sheriff’s star he did not earn becomes a job he has to do.
This is the best thing in the movie. A lesser film would let the liar be exposed and call that a third act. Rango makes the lie true by making him live up to it.
Where the Film Drags and Where It Sings
At 107 minutes, Rango is longer than it needs to be. The middle stretch, after the posse forms and before the water conspiracy snaps into focus, runs on momentum it has not fully earned. The bat-riding clan fight is busy without being tense.
The film is also, at times, too in love with its own weirdness. The Mojave is populated with grotesques, and not every grotesque pays rent. Some are texture. Texture is fine. Texture is not story.
But the highs are high. The duel with Bad Bill, interrupted by the hawk, is staged with real comic timing. The drowning in a desert is a genuinely good mystery beat. And the Spirit of the West, voiced by Olyphant, gives the film a scene that could have been mawkish and instead lands.
The Numbers Behind the Lizard
Rango premiered on February 14, 2011, at Westwood, Los Angeles. Paramount Pictures released it in the United States on March 4, under Nickelodeon Movies. It grossed $246 million worldwide against a $135 million budget. At the 84th Academy Awards, it won Best Animated Feature. Its critical score sits at 7.5 out of 10, with a Metacritic of 75 out of 100.
The commercial result mattered beyond the film. Rango’s success led to the formation of Paramount Animation.
That is a strange legacy for a movie this odd. A chameleon doing cowboy bits became the foundation of a studio’s animation arm. The film that could not decide whether it was for children or for people who had seen Once Upon a Time in the West ended up building the house.
Our Verdict
Rango is a 7.5 out of 10. It is a genuinely ambitious animated film with a real idea at its center — that a performance, sustained long enough, becomes a self — and it has the good sense to let that idea carry the ending rather than a punchline.
It is not Pixar. It is not trying to be. It is a Western with dust on it, made by people who clearly love the films it steals from, and it earns its references rather than decorating with them.
The weaknesses are real. The middle sags. The weirdness occasionally substitutes for invention. And the film never quite decides how dark it wants to go, which leaves a few scenes stranded between menace and slapstick.
But the strengths are the kind that last. Depp’s performance is a performance of a performance, which is exactly right. The water plot has teeth. And the tagline is true in a way most taglines are not: Rango cannot walk out on his own story, and neither can the movie.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Rango
- Year: 2011
- Director: Gore Verbinski
- Writers: John Logan, Gore Verbinski, James Ward Byrkit
- Runtime: 107 minutes
- Premiere: February 14, 2011, Westwood, Los Angeles
- US Release: March 4, 2011
- Distributor: Paramount Pictures (Nickelodeon Movies)
- Budget: $135 million
- Worldwide Gross: $246 million
- Award: Best Animated Feature, 84th Academy Awards
- Critical Score: 7.5/10 (Metacritic 75/100)
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