RANGO

RANGO (PG for some rude humor, mild profanity):  Sooner or later, the new computer generated animations, which were so astonishingly cleverly designed as to surpass the scripts written for them - and for the hosts of movie stars who seemed to be having such a good time following the material written for them - would take the inevitable Hollywood plunge and begin relying more on the CG effects while the material started looking and sounding like mediocre sitcoms.  You know - a recognizable zippy delivery of second-rate stuff that we've begun to hate.

But then arrives Paramount Pictures & Nickelodeon with an exception to the dismal rule.

A narrator tells us we're about to witness the life and untimely death of a hero, who turns out to be Rango, a green lizard wearing a brightly patterned sport shirt (voice of Johnny Depp), who wanders as a stranger into Dirt, a dusty, ramshackle town in the middle of a desert - a place where water is scarce and the owner of it is king.  The rest of the film follows our lizard, Rango, as he learns the ropes, plays the game, but always on the side of the little people against the reigning mayor (in charge of the water) and his band of cutthroats.  Sound familiar?

There's a Greek chorus of sorts, a quartet of Mariochi musicians who, like the mice in "Babe" make sage comments on various scenes and in general tie things together.  The Southwestern locale is also punctuated with reminders that we're not far from the Mexican border - signs like "Hecho en Durango" or "ocupado" are evident, and so are some heavy Mexican accents among the natives (who look like refugees from the bar scene in "Star Wars."

Messages abound with the mayor spouting cynical truths about Life, while our little hero takes an optimistic road away from him.  He comes to a great conclusion in the midst of physical and emotional conflicts when he says forcefully, "People have to believe insomething!" and he supplies it during the final ubiquitous cataclysmic battle between good & evil.

There's something for everyone in this film, from the delightful tongue-in-cheek tributes paid to past films from "Chinatown" to "True Grit" and all the other Westerns of another era including a dip into spaghetti Westerns with a brief parody on Clint Eastwood's Lone Stranger in Town; pleasurably varied performances headed by Johnny Depp, backed capably by Ned Beatty (mimicking  the Walter Huston character from "Chinatown"), Bill Nighy (Rattlesnake Jake), Abigail Breslin (Priscilla) and Harry Dean Stanton (Balthazar); and a crew of equally capable people, from Hans Zimmer (music),  Mark McCreery (production design), Craig Wood (editing), and a whole bunch of people from Industrial Light & Magic - all working together on the trio of script adaptation by Josh Logan, Gore Verbinski, & James Ward Byrkit, based on the original story by Logan. 

Verbinski directs with a sure hand, knows what he wants & where he's going, and he brings both the production team, and us, along with him. 

We can even forgive the fact that the107 minutes seem to drag a bit toward the final climax, causing the tykes to get restless & wander the aisles noisily, but for the rest of us - well, it was a lot of fun, and the more "tributes" we caught the better the movie became.  (Grade: A for adults, C+ for kids).