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Title: Rango
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, there is some strong violence and mild language. Sexual innuendo's are also scattered, as is some smoking and drinking. Recommended for ages 11 and up. |
It’s amazing that in a world that values fantasy elements and bright colors in their animated features, that a film like “Rango” got made at all. Directed by Gore Verbinski (“Pirate of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and “The Weather Man”), “Rango” is a animated film unlike any I’ve seen recently. It’s characters are ugly. It’s setting drab (mostly black and brown). It features adult content and language you wouldn’t expect in a Nickelodeon cartoon. It’s not in 3D (though some shots make me wonder if they were considering it). It’s not even as funny as the ad’s would have you believe. The story involves a pet lizard who has a gift for improv acting and plays out his ideal lives in a glass box.
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One day the glass box falls out of his owners car and he walks through the desert until he comes upon the small town of dirt. There he creates a tough guy persona, takes on an accent, and calls himself Rango. Then - thanks to some quick thinking and dumb luck - he ends up killing a hawk that terrifies the town and becoming the local sherif. Now that he’s got a new job he’s got a new mission: Find out who stole the town’s water supply from the bank. This leads to a big “ proves that there is still some adventure that feels shockingly retro. I know the western genre has been on tough times, but “Rango” who’s us that there’s not only some fun to still be had, but some imagination.
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The look of this film is part of the whole appeal to the film. Though polarizing at first because of the stark realism put in the animals, it ends up being visually imaginative with the characters. Body parts become weapons, you can always tell who the bad guys are, and when it’s time for big shootouts and chases the film looks so real you might very well forget you’re watching an animated movie and mistake it for live action. The film plays out like a great western. One that Clint Eastwood would have made in his old days. Which is just as well since...nah, I’ll let you discover that one yourself. As mentioned above this movie is a little more adult than most parents will likely be expecting.
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Characters drink, smoke, womanize, and shoot one another. Characters die. Though billed as a family film, Gore Verbinski treats the world as a savage world that will kill you if you make one wrong step. Or, in short, he makes a straight up western. Some parents might be uncomfortable with the content, but these are the same parents who watched “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” when they were young, so hopefully they’ll be able to look past that. Finally a lot of this movie works because of the work of Johnny Depp as the title character. If there is a fatal flaw in the design of this film it’s that of Rango himself. It’s not that he looks strange that’s the problem, it’s that he has criminally small eyes.
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As any animator will tell you it’s the eyes that make the character. Big eyes made Rupunzal so delightful and expressive in “Tangled,” but here Rango’s eyes are so small we can barely read his facial expressions. Thankfully Depp gives such a lively performance that he manages to overcome this problem on the animators part, and bring life to this quirky character. If this doesn’t make (yet another) case for why the Oscars should have a best voice over performance award of some kind, then I don’t know what it will take. Overall though, “Rango” is a high spirited western with lots of heart and some great action scenes, which makes it an early rival for Best Animated Feature. Unless, of course, “Cars 2" somehow becomes a critical darling.
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