Review – Rango

The animation is good, especially for 2011. And normally I’d be a sucker for any story set in a world where small, anthropomorphic animals have made a town for themselves out of trash. But the “dumbass who lucks his way into becoming a hero” is just too hard for me to swallow. The cast includes a ton of familiar voices, including Johnny Depp as the title character, Ned Beatty as the main villain and Timothy Olyphant as a a thinly-veiled Clint Eastwood cameo. It’s also heavily peppered with blink-and-you-miss-it allusions to other movies. In more than one way this is an apt transition between Gore Verbinsky’s collaborations with Depp on the popular Pirates of the Caribbean movies and their disastrous turn in The Lone Ranger. Mildly amusing