I want to be fair here and mention the good with the bad. First, I want to thank the makers of Rango for NOT releasing it in 3D. Now, I want to chastise them for making one of the worst animated movies ever made.
I want to be fair here and mention the good with the bad. First, I want to thank the makers of Rango for NOT releasing it in 3D. Now, I want to chastise them for making one of the worst animated movies ever made.
Wow. My jaw was open for this entire movie and I kept asking my six year old daughter if she wanted to leave early. Sadly, she said no. Then she got annoyed that I kept asking her. I then told her I would give her $200 if we could just leave early. Nope. She was at the movies and was having none of it. She wasn’t even really loving the movie either, but she wanted to see how it was going to play out.
Rango is a disasterous attempt at an animated movie featuring a chameleon with an annoyingly crooked neck who, stay with me here, wants to be an actor, falls out of a car, his terrarium breaks, and then he finds himself in an old westerny town run by other animals. Johnny Depp provides the voice, and even he can’t make this movie the least bit engaging.
So what happened? It’s a Nickelodeon kids movie with creepy photorealistic animal characters directed by the guy who did the American version of The Ring. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty.
Let’s start with the most obvious problem: Animation is not live action. It’s another animal. Stop trying to make it look real. Then it’s not animation. When it’s that realistic, there is no style, and… wait for it… there is no CHARM. That’s the largest problem with this movie. It lacks any type of charm whatsoever from the character to the story to the art direction.
Johnny Depp tried to add charm and whether it’s Verbinski’s directing or the character design and animation, it just doesn’t work. It’s the first time I have EVER seen that Johnny Depp didn’t elevate a movie. The movie is so bad it makes him seem mediocre.
Now, the other huge problem: It’s not funny. Now, animated movies don’t HAVE to be funny. But if you are trying to be funny, then you should kinda be funny. Implied lines about lesbians and jokes about a human spine in your fecal matter made me really wonder who the target audience was, and the only thing I could think of was people living in caves in the Himalayas who had never seen a movie or heard a joke before. And even they would have found the jokes easy and in poor taste.
Director Gore Verbinksi (NOT AN ANIMATION DIRECTOR) made a mess and brought Depp from Pirates of the Carribean to help him do it. It worked about as well as when music video directors get to direct narrative movies. While I’m on the subject, it’s less about what medium you work in rather than your sensibilities. When Zack Snyder directed that owl movie, he made the battle scenes cool and stylized and you knew you were watching a Zack Snyder movie. Where he failed miserably, was trying to inject humor into the film with quirky lines of dialogue with the animal characters and it fell flat.
If you like computers, you’ll find something to appreciate in this movie. As I said, photorealistic animal characters that just look creepy instead of charming populate this realistic looking world. Your pixels never looked so good.
This movie was a creative misfire and I can’t even say it looked good. It looked real, but that didn’t make it look good. Even hard core Johnny Depp fans would be hard pressed to find something to like here. Even James Cameron’s computer generated Avatar had more heart than Rango. At this point, they should just let that computer who kicked Ken Jennings’ ass on Jeopardy make a movie. It wouldn’t be any worse.
–Chris Mancini, disagreeing with a LOT of other reviewers who got fooled by the computer.
