Going green

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/03/2011 (5646 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT’S doubtful either Johnny Depp or director Gore Verbinski feel they have to answer to me for their Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Combined, the three films have grossed in the neighbourhood of $2.7 billion.

They win.

Yet the movies, especially the final two in the series, are gaudy, unwieldy pieces of pop cinema. They deliver a certain amount of spectacle and action, yet they are off-putting in their gratuitous weirdness and their utter contempt for narrative coherence. Disregard the spectacle and action, and you come away as befuddled as if you’d just stumbled out of a Cheech and Chong marathon. In Hollywood, one must conclude, nothing succeeds like excess.

As Depp-Verbinski collaborations go, the animated feature Rango may never earn a billion dollars, but it’s the keeper. Instead of combining live action and animation, Rango is completely, immaculately animated — the first wholly animated feature from the folks at Industrial Light & Magic. The form gives Verbinski licence to let his considerable imagination loose, and he duly stampedes across genre lines with a movie that invokes theatre of the absurd, spaghetti westerns, Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the comparatively obscure 1968 Don Knotts yukfest The Shakiest Gun in the West.

Yet it’s still a more cohesive and pleasing movie than any and all of the Pirates fare. Billion-dollar grosses notwithstanding, cartoons are where Verbinski belongs.

Depp, the chameleon actor, literally voices a pet chameleon whose lonely terrarium existence is literally shattered in a highway mishap that sees him abandoned and alone on a desert highway.

Taking advice from a mystic armadillo named Roadkill (voiced by Alfred Molina), the chameleon makes his way to the dirty western town of Dirt, where his penchant for theatrical bravado lands him the name and duties of Sheriff Rango.

He forms attachments to a schoolmarmish lady lizard named Beans (Isla Fisher), and even begins to take his duties seriously, rounding up a posse when a group of desperados makes off with the town’s water-cooler-sized reservoir.

But then the western turns into a detective movie when Rango uncovers a possible conspiracy involving the smooth-talking mayor (Ned Beatty channels John Huston’s Noah Cross character from Chinatown) and a deadly desperado named Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), who is, I probably need not say, a real rattlesnake, albeit with a six-shooter where his rattle should be.

In most animated features, characters tend to be drawn in broad strokes, but in Rango, Verbinski layers on the idiosyncrasy, not just with his hero, but with the townsfolk and especially Beans (who has a tendency to blank into a fugue state at inopportune times).

The animation, modelled after a videotaped performance of the script by the cast in a no-frills rehearsal space, is likewise detail-oriented, and richer for it.

With his scaly eyes, his zig-zag neck and his ludicrous Hawaiian shirt, Rango is surely the homeliest hero Depp has ever portrayed. And yet, he is such a charismatic creation, his ugliness transmogrifies into a thing of Johnny Depp-ian beauty.

The Pirate King is dead. Long live the Lizard King.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca