47297873
Set in a Tex-Mex tumbleweed town in urgent need of a hero to solve its dwindling-resource crisis, the golden CGI nugget “Rango” handily nails western-movie nostalgia and modern-day resonance in one swell swoop.
It’s a gun-slinging family flick for the saloon-foreclosure era. But that’s just gravy on top of the film’s staggeringly well-designed visuals. One of the most aesthetically assured computer-animated movies to ever be built outside the walls of Pixar, the whole scaly, sand-blasted feast has the tactility of pixel-free goodies like “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Where the Wild Things Are” (both of which it echoes in theme and story), and each spectacular, inventive action sequence is better than the last.
The first is a beautiful bit that unfolds on a desert highway, where Rango (voice of Johnny Depp), a pet chameleon, is hurled from a hatchback window when his owners hit an armadillo. To the tune of a symphony, his terrarium shatters on the blacktop, and with thrilling velocity he slides on a shard of glass toward his destiny, which lies just over yonder in the reptile-, rodent- and bird-inhabited town of Dirt. There, the scrawny, bug-eyed, zigzag-necked newcomer spins a bogus origins yarn that tickles the townsfolk, who name him sheriff so that he may help restore their all-but-dried-up water supply. To rousing effect, he also tangles with a hawk, a rattler and a whole battalion of bat-riding mole-rats.
Expect the usual rise-and-fall-and-rise-again path of the haphazard underdog hero, but don’t expect the fatigue that plagued Depp’s and director Gore Verbinski’s partnership in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels. Despite such odd choices as resurrecting the same whiteout hallucinations that befell Jack Sparrow, Verbinksi is working in peak form, keenly guiding a spurred riff on “Chinatown,” complete with a John Huston villain.
The movie begins with Rango, an aspiring thespian, staging his cinematic fantasies while still encased in his domestic prison. How exciting for him and for us that his trek into the great wide open is downright fantastic.
Rango
PG
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Opens tomorrow in area theaters
Recommended Rental
Inside Job
PG-13
Available Tuesday
The Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” explores the horrifying details and effects of 2008’s economic meltdown, and features probing interviews with everyone from financial insiders to Wall Street madams. As much an electrifying shocker as an enlightening investigation, it infuriates as if informs. SPR
47297798
47297868
