Sunday, 6 March 2011

FILM: Rango (dir: Gore Verbinski, 2011)


"If I see your face in this town again, I'm gonna slice it off and use it to wipe my unmentionables."
"Mind the beak....."
If you thought Gnomeo & Juliet was barking mad, Rango goes completely beyond weird. The first act is superb, matching the pace, energy and invention of the classic Tex Avery cartoons with modern CG stylings. As the film goes on, it veers wildly between dark/light and slapstick/ spiritualism, mixing very precise skewering of classic Western genre conventions with anachronistic modern-day references (both filmic and visual) with complete abandon. The animal characters are a bizarre and rough gang, rendered in quite fantastic detail, led by a terrific voice performance by Johnny Depp as pretender-Sherriff Rango, an excitable Isla Fisher as pseudo-love-interest Beans and a clever use of a Greek chorus of mariachi owls! Hans Zimmer must have had great fun creating and playing with a typical Western soundtrack. The film references and the entire use of the Wild West scenario will go completely over the heads of young viewers, but this frantic hit-and-miss movie has something to please everybody at least some of the time.

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