There’s another animated movie doing the rounds in cinemas. It’s called Rango, at least I think it is, if you were going off movie posters then you might think it’s called Johnny Depp.
Yes, Johnny Depp does the voice for the little lizard and the marketing for Rango has been completely focused around the A-lister. This did concern me at first as I didn’t know much about it, and the studio seemed to just be running with Depp’s inclusion in it rather than telling me anything about the story and whatnot. It could’ve been rubbish.
Thankfully though it wasn’t. The story is centred around a thespian pet lizard who is thrown out of his comfort zone and into a desert road when his owners lose control of their car and send his tank out off the back seat. He meets another lizard called Beans and she gives him a ride to the nearby spaghetti Western town.
The town feels like it’s straight out of an authentic Western movie, from the charming wooden buildings running parallel down the clichéd main street to the characters who exist within it, and being a spaghetti Western town there are a few roughians knocking around the place, nowhere more so than the Saloon.
Our lizard hero enters the bar to find there is a drought on and he must settle for Cactus Juice. It is here where he gives himself the persona of a Western legend who can kill 12 brothers with just one bullet. The roughians all warm to him once he tells them his story of façade and Rango (named after part of a word on his bottle of cactus juice) is made the sheriff of the town by the mayor.
The town’s big problem is the drought. They have the town’s water supply stored at the bank and it gets stolen by a bunch of bandits. Rango rounds up a posse to go chase them there bandits and get that water back!
I think what I like best in this movie are the characters and their design. It has so many well designed characters, each with their own silly little quirks. There’s obviously Rango who is a chameleon who has an undying love of acting. Beans, a lizard with a broken defence mechanism that forces her to randomly freeze from time to time. The mayor is your typical Texan mayor, an old turtle who’s lived for so long and has seen the town change from year to year. But the best character in the whole movie is Rattlesnake Jake, played by Bill Nighy and is designed brilliantly. He wears a cowboy hat, and has a Gatling gun instead of the rattle on his tail. It’s even topped off with the Gatling gun’s ammunition wrapped all around his body.
Even the secondary characters are good: the spider undertaker; the bank manager, Merrimack; the flattened armadillo, voiced by Alfred Molena; the Mexican birds who appear to narrate portions of the film; even Clint Eastwood appears as the Spirit of the West.
Yeah there are plenty of references to other movies out there. Clint Eastwood’s appearance being the most obvious. As it happens he isn’t even voiced by Eastwood, instead it’s Timothy Olyphant, yes Henri from I am Number Four. I must admit, though the reference is cool, it seems strange that it doesn’t have Eastwood’s voice.
There are a few other pitfalls, such as some characters not really having much depth to them. For example Beans, who is a major character, has the freezing problem. It keeps mentioning the problem, as if something happened to her to make her do this. But we never find out why. It felt like it was going to be important and then obviously wasn’t. Perhaps it got edited out.
Also, it’s not so much a gripe, but when the posse are travelling in the underground there is a giant (and I mean giant) eye that opens and looks at them. Seriously, it’s huge, if this is to scale then that eye is rivalling that of Godzilla’s! What was that thing!? I want to know! Is it a Sauron reference!? What was that!?
One thing I do know though is that the soundtrack to Rango is fantastic. Hans Zimmer is at the helm and manages to capture the essence of a Western whilst also enriching it in power and fun. One scene has the bandits chasing down the posse as they escape with the water, the soundtrack changes to a Western version of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as the bandits swoop down on bats. That makes it my favourite scene of the movie. For some reason Ride of the Valkyries works with banjos.
Rango really is a fun film that everyone can enjoy. It’s largely seen as a kid’s movie but it offers a lot for an older audience too. It’s not groundbreaking stuff but it’s worth a watch just for the characters involved in it. Rattlesnake Jake will go down in history as a excellently well thought out antagonist and Johnny Depp does brilliantly as the voice of the cold blooded protagonist. I think they must have just said to him when recording his lines "just do whatever you want." It is unmistakably Johnny Depp and without him I'm not sure this movie would have worked half as much.
All in all Rango is an enjoyable and fun watch. If it involves Rattlesnake Jake then I'm happy for a sequel to be made.
Final verdict: 3 Stars. For characters that really stand out from the crowd.
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