We saw Rango yesterday, an animated comedy featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as a thespian lizard who, plunged into an isolated western town, decides to pretend he’s a much tougher hombre than he is, and the hijinks that follow.
I walked out of the theater feeling like I hadn’t witnessed a proper movie, but rather a splicing of other, better-known movies. I hasten to add that virtually all the humor of the film comes from reference jokes, so many moments of familiarity are to be expected, and would be entirely fine as far as they go. A glimpse of Depp and Del Toro’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pair as they races through the Nevada wastes is a quick laugh; a quick musical cue straight out of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores is fun; the initial appearance of a turtle reprising John Huston’s role in Chinatown feels playful. I was mightily entertained, and if the movie had kept it up, I’d have walked away smiling.
Sadly, somewhere around the 40% mark, the script seems to worry that reference gags won’t carry it to the end, and that’s when the movie veers off course. The Chinatown plot is not a brief reference gag; it’s taken wholesale as the plot of Rango as well, which becomes apparent by the second or third time the mayor shows up. And not in a good way. Because advertizing the story this way spoils the mystery and drama, there isn’t any point to trying to make Rango a proper movie; there is no reason to throw in a love interest, to play up the protagonist’s internal conflict, to try to get us invested in the hapless townsfolk, because there is no hope of creating such an investment. The audience isn’t ever going to care, because we already know how it turns out. There’s a lengthy sequence taken straight out of Mad Max, in which Rango races the town’s water supply in a jug teetering on the back of a careening cart, a gang of crazed moles in pursuit. Eventually, the cart crashes and the jug proves—gasp!—empty, just like Mad Max. Well, duh.
But by this point, we’re expected to care about the vanished water, rather than smirk knowingly and look to the next joke, and the movie gets tangled in its own expectations.
I suspect the insidious belief that animation means “children’s movie,†and vice versa, is at work here. Kids, of course, will not recognize Chinatown and Mad Max and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But of course, only kids, or parents looking for something to keep them occupied, watch animation. So we need a plot. Quick! Let’s get a love interest in there; let’s treat the villain’s stolen master plan like it’s a big surprise; let’s linger over Rango’s self-image. No time to exploit the film’s merits; we’ve gotta make this sell to the kiddies! With a McDonald’s Happy Meal crossover, if at all possible.
So somewhere around the 40% mark, I wasn’t laughing as hard as I was at the film’s outset. Somewhere around the 50% mark, I began to realize I wasn’t laughing. And somewhere around the 60% mark, I began to resent Dreamworks and its business model, which has done so much for its bottom line since Shrek so unjustly beat out Monsters, Inc. at the Oscars.
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