Culture

Directed by Gore Verbinski. (4/5).
Don’t be fooled by the trailer which, emblazoned with star Johnny Depp’s name, sells Rango as a kid’s film with a smart-mouthed hero and lots of laughs.
 

From the opening scenes, it’s obvious this isn’t as light as the usual animated fare. When the lizard protagonist (Johnny Depp) is thrown from the safety of his owners’ car in the middle of nowhere, he is forced to wander across the scorching desert in search of salvation, dodging hawk attacks and having eerie hallucinations.
 

He discovers the hillbilly, animal-inhabited town of Dirt, where he convinces the townsfolk he is a fearless gunslinger named Rango. He is quickly appointed sheriff and trusted with the town’s most urgent mission – to find more water, because Dirt is drying up. Rango gets so caught up in this “role of a lifetime” that he forgets he is living a lie, and as the town’s trust in him strengthens, so does the threat that his deception will collapse.
 

The plot is nothing new. And in many other aspects, including its often low-brow humour, Rango is mundane. There’s plenty of excitement though. Rango’s journey to save Dirt is packed with action, building up to Rango’s climactic duel with a huge, gun-slinging snake. One by one, all the Western conventions are ticked off.
 

But Rango also incorporates the great Western themes; the loner’s place in society, the battle between people and nature and the corruption at the roots of authority. There are brief but beautiful segments where Rango experiences existential angst, wandering through dreams asking himself who he is. In these, the depths emerge from behind the film’s bullet-ridden surface.
 

Peopled with reptiles and rodents, Rango is a clever homage to the Western, Perhaps it could have done with a little less gunfire and a little more substance, but it’s a film all movie lovers will appreciate, filled as it is with cultural references and allusions and slyly suggesting that all the world really is a stage.