2011-03-13
It is striking how the movie "Rango" makes use of the most innovative, daring, cutting-edge technologies to bring you a story that, in most respects, is insipid, boring, and predictable.
Surprise, surprise: it's nothing more than a remake: Walter Mitty as a lizard, with portions of Chinatown thrown in, along with "A Fistfull of Dollars". Add in "Puss'n'boots" from Shrek, except now he's an accordion-player in a Mexican band. The girl, Beans, is not much. She is merely the canvas upon which Rango paints his courage.
There's a point to that. The adventure seems to take place entirely within Rango's imagination. It's makes sense that his imagination has synthesized elements of old movies into a hodgepodge of scenes and incidents that seem disconnected to each other-- watch when they suddenly form a posse to go after the water thief.
It's still disappointing. It's a moderately interesting rehash of Hollywood kitsch. I just wish someone would put as much effort into developing an original, interesting story and characters as they do into the technology. Boom boom flash flash
This happens consistently, from "Shrek" to "Toy Story" to "Madagascar".
Rango's romantic interest, Beans, is "spunky" in that tired, harmless, anesthetized manner of the Disney template: all the important action is carried by the male character, even when he wimps out.
And that is the most tired, depressing moment in the movie: Rango wimps out, trudges off slowly to funereal music, gives up. Well, in the most conventional of American cultural conventions, giving up is the worst sin of all so he must be, he will be, he inevitably will redeem himself, good triumphs, nobody is hurt (Rango never kills anyone), and the threatening horizon of narrative originality is vanquished again.