Rango

My housemate Rich had this on DVD the other day. It's a cartoon in which Johnny Depp stars as the voice of Rango, a chameleon who ends up the sheriff of the wild west town of Dirt after he finds himself stuck there in the middle of a drought.

Sounds all a little weird, but it gets weirder. Our hero Rango starts his journey off by falling out the back of a car and nearly being run over by desert traffic. He then meets a part-run-over armadillo who tells him to head into the desert to find himself / complete his journey / insert stock spiritual phrase here. Then there's loads of psychedelia.

This is a stylish fantasy that pays a homage to Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns and relies heavily on American Indian spiritualism to create a mystical backdrop for the story. Problem is though that it tries to be too many things without really succeeding at any of them. There's a little adult humour, some slapstick for the kids and a heavy dose of spiritualism - but these parts never fit together into a whole.

For most of the film I wasn't really sure what the central narrative was, it only focused on the drought in 'Dirt' as the main story after a lot of flapping around with inconsequential stuff that I think was meant to distract kids.

Perhaps it was a mistake to watch the director's cut (I did suggest we watch the theatrical version - but my housemates 'knew better') as a lot of this stuff was probably taken out of the theatrical release. It ended up being way too long for what it was, it's the best part of 100 minutes for what amounts to no more than a cartoon chameleon flapping his way through banter with frontier animals.

I was kind of hoping I'd missed the point and that in fact had some deeper meaning rather than the spiritualism being a total mess. But checking IMDB drew me a big fat blank.