5 out of 5

Director: Gore Verbinski

Rango has fully convinced me that Gore Verbinski knows his game. It’s also the perfect outlet for Johnny Depp’s intense characterizations. That it also happens to be one of the most respectful and intelligent kid-geared films in quite some time is a bonus. What’s the plot of Rango? Well – it could be simple. It could be an anthropomorphic hero’s tale, the general quest to find the hero in oneself. Such territory has certainly been mined in many a kid film before. But Nickelodeon films seems to be willing to push to boundaries of ‘family’ films, to the viewer’s benefit, making this a stirring call back to 80s and 90s era pre-everything-must-be-CGI-robots kid movie. Think Goonies. In fact, think of tons of classic Hollywood, because Rango has no shortage of bug-eyed references tossed in that make you want to rewind and salivate over the obvious love of genre that Verbinski has. And along these more mature lines are the enhancements to the plot, a very meta search for identity that reaches into the heights of silly, dry humor and visual gags and into the lows of one depressed and dejected lizard. While the Pirates movie made me fear that Verbinski had fallen prey to the Jerry Bruckheimer ‘bigger is better’ bug, here in Rango he shows that his amazing grasp of visual space emerged intact, with some very fun (and again, frequently movie-referencing) action sequences feeling very tangible, a far cry from the slow-mo soaked video-gameish montages that seem to pop up in many kid movies and cartoons nowadays. That being said, Rango won’t ring true for everyone – it’s not very cute (the did a great job of making this a rugged and dry western) and the humor is pretty bland and silly. But this is what film is made for – entertaining us, showing us new spins on old ideas – and a kid film that dares not to pander, takes its time, and doesn’t feature a catchy pop song is a pretty rare thing in our spastic culture.