Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is one of the great flukes of American cinema. If you want the textbook definition of a movie that should not, under any circumstances, work from a commercial or critical point of view, here's your example. Black Pearl is a pirate movie, first of all. Those don't do that well at the box office, and haven't for a very long time. Though it was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures and produced by hitmaker Jerry Bruckheimer, the director of the movie, Gore Verbinski, hadn't ever made a big-budget action movie (he did, however, direct The Ring and The Mexican). The movie starred Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, and Keira Knightley. While none of these actors were unknowns, Depp hadn't ever been an action hero or box-office catnip, Bloom was unproven outside of the Lord of the Rings series, and Rush and Knightley weren't likely to encourage audiences to check the movie out. Oh, and don't forget the final piece: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was based on a ride at a theme park.
So the movie making over $300 million in this country in 2003 was pretty crazy. There are now four Pirates movies, and the last one made a billion dollars across the world. Johnny Depp has become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, even though his crowning success as an actor is probably far from his role as the rascally Captain Jack Sparrow. Verbinski has become a go-to director in Hollywood, as well. I bring all of this up to make sense of Rango, which is one of the strangest mainstream movies I've seen in a long time. No, we're not talking about David Lynch-level weirdness here, but Rango is one of those movies that directors and/or actors make only after they've been successful enough that a studio will give them carte blanche. When Inception came out last summer, it made a lot of money, granted, but it also existed solely because the film's writer/director, Christopher Nolan, was the shepherd of the wildly popular Batman series at Warner Bros.
Rango is like Inception in that way. Here's a movie that probably couldn't have existed had Depp and Verbinski not teamed up for the enormous hits that are the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. While the plot of Rango isn't that complicated or, when you boil it down, too complex, I'm still amazed at the audacity of the filmmakers, from Verbinski to screenwriter John Logan. Pitching a movie to executives as a mix of Chinatown and the Man With No Name trilogy from Sergio Leone is one thing. Pitching a children's movie with those elements is something else. But, yeah, that's pretty much what Rango is. The titular character, voiced by Depp, is a chameleon whose life changes when the terrarium he lives in gets knocked out of a car in the middle of the desert. He stumbles around the dry heat for a bit before he's picked up by a pretty iguana (Isla Fisher) and introduced to the Western-style town of Dirt, populated by other desert-dwelling creatures like rattlesnakes, turtles, and moles. After inadvertently scaring off a villainous animal and killing a hawk that had been chasing him, Rango becomes sheriff and discovers a nefarious plot by the town's mayor to control the water.
From the first moment that the town's mayor (voiced by Ned Beatty, last heard as Lotso, the villain in Toy Story 3) begins talking and discusses the future of Dirt, I laughed out loud at the ballsiness on display from Verbinski and Logan. For impressionable kids, Chinatown is extremely inappropriate. But if you take out some of the more unsavory parts of the movie (such as the final twist regarding the femme fatale), and put a talking turtle with a cowboy hat in place of John Huston, you might be onto something. For all of the uniqueness that you can find in Rango, all of the plot seems to be a stew of eighteen other, better movies. There's no question that the animation in the film is impressive, especially the backgrounds and the design of the town of Dirt (though I don't know how much Verbinski was involved in that part of the movie, considering that he filmed Depp and the other actors in live-action, acting out the film). If the plot was half as striking, this movie would be one of the best of 2011.
I was a bit let down by the story, but most of the actors are well-cast. Depp has been kind of, I think, coasting on the persona of Captain Jack Sparrow for a few years, but he definitely is enjoying himself as Rango, as blustery a hero as they come. From the opening scene, where he acts out a play that's unfolding from his fevered mind, to his heroic final stand against the mayor and Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy, because of course), Depp gets to showcase his expressive voice. I'm usually not a fan of animated movies casting famous people, mostly because those famous people are cast for their fame, not for their talented voices. This movie has a surfeit of famous, non-animated actors--Depp, Fisher, Beatty, Nighy, Ray Winstone, Alfred Molina, and Harry Dean Stanton--but they do all feel appropriate for their roles.
The biggest question I had walking away from Rango was, "What would kids think of this movie?" While Paramount Pictures made a nice chunk of change on this movie (it grossed nearly $250 million worldwide), I wonder if kids were baffled or just put off by this oddity. Any movie that gleefully makes references to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Man with No Name (voiced here by Timothy Olyphant, not Clint Eastwood, though the character is clearly meant to be the latter) isn't really for kids, not entirely. Here's the truth of it: Rango could have easily been in live-action (switching the characters into humans, of course), but then the unoriginality of the story would've been the only thing anyone noticed. The visuals here--as they are with some of Verbinski's other movies--are striking and arresting, and the action sequences are inventive enough. But if I was 10, would I say the same thing? I doubt it.
As mentioned above, Rango did decently considering its odd hook and its spring release. Paramount Pictures is, apparently, so impressed with the film and the work from the animators that they're going into animation separate from DreamWorks Animation, whose films they've distributed for a few years. I'm not really a big fan of DreamWorks' animated efforts (with the exception of How to Train Your Dragon), but financially, distributing their movies makes sense. I'm not sure that Paramount will be glad that they're severing ties with DreamWorks in a few years, should they not come up with more successful, more iconic movies. Rango is a lot of things, but its iconography is copied, not singular.
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