Tarantino at his most indulgent in Hateful 8

You’ve never seen a western like Hateful Eight, which is neither praise nor pan. 

Before we begin there, though, take yourself back to Inglourious Basterds. It had Hitler, Churchill, Nazis, the French resistance, a vile Jew-hunting SS officer, wise-talking GIs, machine guns, bombs, interrogations … everything one could hope for in a World War II movie. Pulp Fiction, a crime movie, had robberies, murders, drug deals, drug overdoses, fixed boxing fights, kidnapping, torture. Kill Bill, a revenge thriller in two parts, had kung-fu, animation, gunfights, swordfights, assassinations. I bring all this up because director Quentin Tarantino really packs everything he can into his movies, and he also boils his genres down to their most basic parts and then he exemplifies those parts with his subversive brand of glee.

Hateful Eight, though, is a western with few of the characteristics that define a western, least of all the adventurous spirit of the West. No saloon brawls, no high-noon shootouts, no horse chases or cattle rustlers, and not even a train heist or bank robbery. None of this is really out of the ordinary for Tarantino, who seems to thrive on taking what we expect and giving us something completely different. But Hateful Eight is not only a letdown as a western, it’s a tremendously indulgent film for the brash director, who likely didn’t hear the word “no” very often when he was pitching it as a three-hour, single-location stage play with overture and intermission and enough mindless dialogue to undo all the goodwill he’s earned from a career of mindless dialogue. 

The film opens on a stagecoach as it travels through a blizzard in Colorado. Inside the cabin are bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), John’s latest bounty that he intends to take to a town called Red Rock where she will hang for her crimes. Slowly, amid the snow and wind, the stagecoach begins assembling the cast: there’s the feisty stagecoach driver (James Parks), a former union officer Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and soon-to-be sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Early scenes take place in the stagecoach as three of the men and Domergue talk about bounties, bushwhackers and a letter from President Abraham Lincoln. This tedious dialogue is neither boring nor interesting, but it fills the cabin of the stagecoach for north of 20 minutes. And the landscapes are glorious, with scenic views of snow-capped peaks and of the tiny stagecoach framed against nature’s grandeur. This is why Tarantino filmed in 70mm, and it’s beautiful —a beauty that fades away as the film moves indoors permanently.

With a blizzard bearing down, the stagecoach stops at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the film will spend the rest of its running time, and where our travelers take refuge inside with Mexican Bob (Demián Bichir), a proper English gentleman (Tim Roth), a weary cow-puncher (Michael Madsen), and Confederate general (Bruce Dern). What happens next would best be described by saying “the plot of Clue.” Men are killed, some coffee is poisoned, and Daisy Domergue cackles with delight as John Ruth questions who is and isn’t who they say they are.

Hateful Eight wasted so much of my time, that I will not to do the same here: the movie is simply far too long. A skilled editor could have his or her way with this and come out 45 minutes lighter, and the movie would gallop like cowboy’s quarter horse. Here, though, it’s so bloated and top-heavy it can never build momentum. Dialogue just keeps rolling out of everyone’s mouth, and so little of it is noteworthy or memorable that it all blends into a monotonous dribble of cowboy talk and frontier banter. Jackson has a great monologue about torturing a confederate soldier — he repeatedly says the word “dingus” which gets some decent laughs during a darker chapter about Union revenge — but these scenes are few and far between. 

With so much dialogue, you’d think the characters would have more — you know — character, but they never elevate out of Tarantino’s muck of words. Russell’s bounty hunter has an interesting look and particularly evocative dialect of country words, but he seems lost amid the exposition and mood that are telegraphed within pages of dialogue. Jackson and Goggins do what they can, even as the film ratchets tension around their plight that can only end one way. As characters trade conversations inside the store, amid the shaking of the blizzard and a broken door that needs to be hammered shut, none of it really leads anywhere. By the time the intermission starts, the film is nearly at the two-hour mark and you slowly start to realize that a better movie would have you walking to your car at this point. But Hateful Eight toils onward.

Post-intermission scenes do greatly improve, largely because key sequences from earlier are revisited in Tarantino’s out-of-order style of chapter organization. And while the first two-thirds are largely bloodless, the last third pours the guts, blood and mayhem on thick as all parties turn on one another. Snickering through much of it is Daisy Domergue, who might be the sole salvation in this twisted whodunit. Leigh seems delighted to play the demented little demoness. Russell has some great lines, and his thick porkchop sideburns do justice to his unapologetic ruggedness. Jackson is Jackson, which is way of saying he’s excellent, but I found the 75-plus uses of the N word thrown at his character excessive and entirely unnecessary — Tarantino believes we should take the power from the word, which is admirable but altogether impossible in this context.

I admire Tarantino’s vision, but Hateful Eight simply doesn’t work. Slap any other name on this film and every cowpoke on the range will tell you it’s too long, too wordy and too meandering. But Tarantino’s name is on it, so it’s brilliant — I’m sorry, but no thanks. He’s showing off here, and for once in his career, it’s not really working like it once did.

Westerns return to greatness with Slow West

A teenager stumbles into a cluster of trees as he walks his horse through clouds of acrid smoke. He comes into a clearing where he discovers the source, a smoldering Indian encampment. Burned teepees are scorched and ruined, their narrow bones still upright and revealing their triangular corpses. The scene is played in black and grays, with an immense feeling of dread that looms over the wayward boy lost in nature’s wrath. The sequence was likely shot on a soundstage, but it feels like a Caravaggio painting come to life in the West. 

I’ve never quite seen anything like this before, which further proves the resilience of Hollywood’s oldest genre, the western. 

Slow West is an intense burn of a cowboy picture. It comes together like an epic romance: a lovelorn teen, Jay Cavendish (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), journeys to America’s Western frontier to find his sweetheart, Rose. Rooted in romance and the Old West, the film is more an absurdist road adventure and surreal fantasy: In an early scene, Jay looks up over the frontier, aims his revolver at the stars and watches as they light up like a shooting gallery. This scene leads into the burning of the Indian village, which is so hauntingly beautiful that it seems plucked from another movie in another genre.

Jay quickly meets Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), a bounty hunter with a secret in his pocket: a wanted poster with Rose’s picture on it. Silas agrees to help Jay find Rose, even though his intentions are deadly and selfish. What transpires on their journey is a magnificent set of adventures, the likes of which have never before been seen in a western. You’ll know you’re very far away from John Wayne and Clint Eastwood when Jay meets a trio of Congolese singers on the road. Who are these men, and where did they come from? Slow West doesn’t elaborate, just presents images and shambles onward toward Rose’s doom. 

Much of the film can be broken up into episodes, including one where Jay and Silas are stalked by the film’s villain, a fellow bounty hunter. I kept thinking I knew where this scene would go, and Slow West goes far and wide to prove you can’t predict anything in this strange western universe. The confrontation, or lack thereof, ends when the creek they’re camped next to floods, washing their weapons away and leaving them with soaked clothes. They ride away in their longjohns with their clothing tied to clotheslines stretched between their horses.

Another episode takes place with a traveling preacher, who imparts one last piece of advice on a slip of paper that reads “West” with an arrow pointing. If only Jay had picked up the paper before the breeze, which forever scrambles the arrow’s intended direction. In another scene, Jay and Silas are caught up in a store robbery that goes wrong in every conceivable way. And then they step outside and it gets even worse. 

Slow West is written and directed by John Maclean, whose debut here as an innovative force is about as fine as debuts come. Maclean’s biggest film credit before this was in High Fidelity, in which his band at the time, the Beta Band, has a song featured in a key sequence. How he got here to Slow West, and why — and what took so long — are questions almost as fascinating as the film itself. Almost.

It’s written perfectly, with balance for the deceptively complex narrative and the intriguing characters; the performances are spot-on, with Smit-McPhee and Fassbender making an unlikely but likable pairing; and the visuals are poetic and serve the film’s larger theme that man is not nearly as cruel as nature. Consider these three shots: a tree that has fallen on a lumberjack, his axe-wielding skeleton splayed out beneath the trunk. Ants crawling on and in the barrel of a gun. And, in one of the final shots of the film, jump cuts to each and every person killed since the beginning of the movie.

Death comes for everyone, but in Slow West it lingers, and chokes, and it does not come quickly.

Laughs, deaths equal out in Western comedy

Filling in the long-dormant void of absurdist cowboy humor left by Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Seth MacFarlane’s equally batty A Million Ways to Die in the West goes far at convincing us Saddles’ unchallenged dominance might be ready for a toppling. Just not quite far enough with this lesser, though still amusingly irreverent, western.

If anything, MacFarlane — the star, writer and director — restrains himself. If you recall, Blazing Saddles ended when the cowboys spilled out of the picture and into adjacent movies. A Million Ways to Die in the West seems poised for a similar feat, but then it reins back its galloping absurdity even as Neil Patrick Harris, mid-duel, fills a ten-gallon hat with 12 gallons of you’d-rather-not-know. 

The Family Guy and Ted creator is a curious actor. He enters the Old west scenery as an oddity: suspenders, vest, impeccably smooth plastic-like skin, an anime-like tuft of hair above his forehead. He looks like he’s headed to an audition for Pinocchio, not The Searchers. And then that voice — it booms like he’s about to advertise for American-made pickup trucks. 

MacFarlane plays Albert, a sheepherder with some confidence issues. In the opening moments he loses his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) because he’s perceived as weak and not manly enough for the West. This is the mantra of the movie: the Old West is so dangerous that literally anything can kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you — perhaps just wounds or maims — then the doctor will finish you off with his bizarre frontier treatments. We meet the doctor later when he lets a bluejay peck at an open wound on Albert’s face. 

Albert isn’t a coward. He just values life, which is why he doesn’t take any risks, although he does have a few too many drinks in the saloon and then tries to ride home — “Don’t drink and horse,” his friends warn him. Later, Albert goes to the town fair, where an escaped bull skewers a man (Mr. Belding!) like a hot dog over a roasting fire. “People die at the fair,” he confirms to himself after a photographer’s flash lamp explodes, igniting the photographer and his two subjects. Two nearby cowpunchers “put out” the fire by shooting the burning victims. Yeah, people die at the fair. 

The beautiful part of this deadly motif is that it allows MacFarlane to dredge up every western cliché, if only to lampoon it to the bar in his cynical tone and style. Gunfights, whorehouses, snakebites, horses, saloons, sheriffs, preachers, American Indians … if it’s been in a western then it’s desecrated here with MacFarlane’s vitriolic wit. Some of the jokes crack like thunder, including one where a man pulls out a dollar bill and the gathered townspeople bow their heads out of respect to a denomination they have not been privileged to see in the flesh. “Take your hat off, boy, that’s a dollar bill,” a father yells at his son. 

Other jokes land with thuds, including a scene with a pot-laced cookie, Islamic death chants, a sheep with “retardation,” and an unfortunate line about women and the size of their butts in frontier fashion. White guys opening jokes with “If I were a black guy I would …” rarely goes well. Racial humor comes up several times, including at the fair where Albert plays a game called Runaway Slaves, with century-old imagery that is still shocking today. The arcade game turns up in the post-credit sequence with some vindication, but it’s a risky joke that almost derails West’s forward momentum. 

The movie is all fun and games until Clinch (Liam Neeson) and his posse ride into town with the intention of killing and robbing before moving onto the next town. Little humor is written into this villain, which is such a shame considering that Neeson, with that classical cowboy face, seems like a sport for MacFarlane’s twisted sense of humor. Charlize Theron plays Anna, Clinch’s wife and Albert’s new love interest. Theron’s Anna is written some jokes, but Clinch is not — he’s a completely serious character in an otherwise wacky movie. It’s very strange. 

Giovanni Ribisi and Sarah Silverman play a deeply religious couple in the middle of a very chaste courtship, even though she plays a rather accomplished prostitute who has sex with “10 men … on a slow day” but won’t go all the way with her man because God forbids it. Silverman is appropriately foul mouthed, and Ribisi feigns timid embarrassment — they are hilarious performances. Neil Patrick Harris plays a early douchebag who works in the town’s Mustachery; he has a largely perfect song and dance number about facial hair. The film has many fart jokes, including four in the first 20 minutes, but Harris will out-gross everything late in the movie with his painful hat maneuver. Keep your eyes open for many cameos, including Ryan Reynolds, Ewan McGregor, Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Maher, Wes Studi and Christopher Lloyd pulling a John-Hurt-in-Spaceballs appearance. 

As rewarding as this western-themed comedy is, A Million Ways to Die in the West could have gotten away with so much more. The rambunctious farce, a horse hair shy of an outright spoof, should have went bonkers, yet came up a day late, but not — hats off — a dollar short.

Western remake lacks heart, literally

Walt Disney had a clear vision: to make boys and girls happy.

So I found myself appalled — and a wee bit frightened for the Disney culture — in The Lone Ranger when, contrary to the entire history and tone of the Lone Ranger mythology, a villain slowly plunges a knife into a ranger’s belly, reaches up into his quivering guts, removes his heart and eats it in front of him as he chokes to death on his own blood.

I hope that description shocks you. It shocked me and I’ve seen some terrible, terrible violence in movies over the years. But never straight-up cannibalism in a picture made by the House of Mouse, the studio that brought us bottled innocence The Little Mermaid, Tinker Bell and a theme park attraction called Toontown. Not since Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) took her boobs out in S.O.B. has the Disney audience been so cruelly betrayed.

Violence or not, though, The Lone Ranger is a horrible misstep for Disney, which is clearly trying to jumpstart some magic akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The Pirates movies, the good and the stupid ones, always understood their tone; even the grimmer episodes, with squid hearts in treasure chests and Jack Sparrow in the afterlife, had a cheery bounce to their step. Here in The Lone Ranger the action is lifeless, the characters are obscenely flat, and the style and tone ricochet off everything, like buckshot fired into a blacksmith’s shop. It’s as if Disney, with its eternal legacy of great storytelling, had suddenly forgotten how to tell a decent story.

The film makes no promises with its titles. You’d think a movie titled The Lone Ranger would be about the Lone Ranger, the masked cowboy who sets out to save the Old West from cattle rustlers, banditos and silver barons. No, it’s more about Tonto, a Comanche Indian with a dead bird on his head that he feeds corn meal as if it were alive and squawking. A clue to who the real protagonist is can be found in the casting: Tonto is played by Johnny Depp, eternal scene-stealer and movie bandit. The guy can’t make a cameo without getting his name above the title.

Sure enough, Depp, caked in mud and warpaint, has the best lines here — including a great line after his partner says his famous “high ho, Silver” catchphrase — even as the film continuously wanders through very mediocre territory. The whole thing is told from Tonto’s perspective and even uses his unreliable narration from 1933 to embark on a story that takes place in 1869. His audience is a peanut-chomping boy at a Wild West exposition. Depp is in old-man makeup and it’s remarkable how cheap old-man makeup still looks in films.

The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), is the film’s dopey afterthought. He enters the film as a weakling, and maintains that posture for 120 minutes. “This is the first time I’ve fired a gun in nine years,” he tells Tonto during a gunfight. (“Best keep that to yourself, Kemosabe,” Tonto says back.) By the end of the film, though, especially in that mayhem-scorched final 20 minutes, the Lone Ranger suddenly becomes a seasoned pro, galloping his trusty steed Silver through train cars, hurtling off saloon rooftops and winging bad guys from hundreds of feet away. He is the least heroic character until the movie requires him to be the most heroic character, and then he becomes Bruce Willis on overdrive.

The plot involves a mish-mash of western motifs — including a heavy homage to Once Upon A Time in the West — but it mostly boils down to a railroad tycoon who is willing to launch an Indian genocide if it means his trains get to steam right up to silver deposits on Indian land. This stock Old West archetype (played by Tom Wilkinson) uses the deformed monster and heart nibbler Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to whip up an Indian panic scary enough to get the cavalry to show up with sabers rattling.

Between the rail tycoon, Butch and the cavalry captain, these are some bad dudes. First, let me reiterate this: Butch eats a guy’s heart. In a Disney movie! This can’t be repeated enough. Elsewhere, the villains and their henchmen shoot priests, murder a posse of rangers, use a crank-driven Gatling gun to exterminate a tribe of Comanche, they kill two of the movie’s three black characters (one of them is scalped), threaten to rape a woman twice, skulls are crushed in with wooden beams and questionable jokes are made about what is most definitely a gay cowboy. All totaled up, this is one violent and profoundly upsetting Disney movie, one that goes against the very spirit of the brand. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised from a director whose first name is Gore.

These are unforgivable errors on Verbinksi and Disney’s parts, but their impacts would have been lessened if The Lone Ranger were simply better in other departments, but it fails at nearly every aspect. The jokes are either laugh-out-loud funny (Tonto literally kicking a dead horse) or chronically immature (a burping Silver). Many of the sequences are too long and end with little payoff, including one scene at a campfire with vampire bunnies. The entire film lacks any real momentum, and every time it picks up speed the narrative pauses to bounce us back to the 1933 storytelling framework. It’s all simply too long, too slow and often downright boring.

The Long Ranger’s only redemption is its unearned, unjustified finale, which blasts us with Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” the Lone Ranger’s official theme song. It cues up for the last 20 minutes or so, with Tonto and the Lone Ranger bringing their A-game to a rather epic two-train chase through Old West locations. This music and the action it’s set to — even after all the heinous violence this movie tortured me with — lifted my spirits immensely. The Lone Ranger rides Silver atop a moving train, and then in the train, as he shoots through windows and gallops past gunslingers. Tonto has a slapstick bit with a ladder balanced precariously on a train rail. The mood is light and fun, the music is thumping, the action is serious but never gross or violent, the movie is actually accelerating … for this very brief moment, The Lone Ranger finds its groove. If only the whole movie would have been like this.  

I recommend that last sequence, but I can’t in good conscience recommend the two hours that gets you to that point. I especially urge you to think twice before taking your young children.

Imagine that: a Disney movie too violent for your children. Sad stuff.

(So yeah, I didn't like this movie, but check out some of the publicity stills. They're quite good.)

Unchained melody: Django’s song of the South is a cathartic explosion against slavery

The world is not ready for a movie like Django Unchained. I’m not entirely sure it will ever be ready. But here it is, in all its spur-jangling glory.

Quentino Tarantino, first a director of realistic crime dramas, has been making the rounds on all the other genres in recent years. He dabbled in kung-fu and martial arts movies with Kill Bill, sleazy exploitation films in Death Proof, and then World War II with Inglourious Basterds. Now here is Tarantino’s first western and, like his other jaunts through Hollywood’s varied genres, this one is a one-of-a-kind, see-it-to-believe-it kind of experience. I saw it, but I’m not entirely sure I believed it — I think my jaw hung open for most of it.

Just, just … wow! It really is a force that can’t be reckoned with. Scholars may analyze it, film professors may pick it apart, movie critics may diagnose it, but I really think it defies even the most basic scrutiny. It involves slavery, but it doesn’t make any grand statements about that scourge on American history, other than it is bad and woe unto the white man who keeps a black man in chains. Django is not an analogy, or metaphor, or a parable. It simply is. Take it at face value and just leave it alone.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a southern slave sometime around the Civil War. He’s propositioned by dentist and bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a wily German killer with a knack for long conversations that wind back around to startling conclusions. Schultz wants to purchase then hire Django to track down three killers, and in return Schultz will help Django — “The D is silent” — rescue his wife from vile slave owner  Calvin Candie, who lives on a plantation aptly named Candie Land. Milton Bradley is rolling (snake eyes) in his grave.

Like Kill Bill, much of the plot is a revenge fantasy set within an anachronism of hip-hop, ’70s-era exploitation cinema, Spaghetti Westerns and singer-songwriters. Django and Schultz are often seen riding through beautifully photographed plains and deserts while RZA, Ennio Morricone or Jim Croce are pumping from the speakers. Tarantino has no interest in playing fair with his history. Recall that in Iglourious Basterds he had two Americans fill Adolf Hitler with enough lead to contain a nuclear reactor in your kitchen with no radiation leakage, so yeah, there’s that. I imagine history books are more like coasters at the Tarantino casa. He does seem to take great interest in the look and feel of the Deep South, with period-appropriate costumes and interiors. There’s a funny bit with Schultz buying Django a suit, “any suit you want,” and he picks out an ensemble that Napoleon would call pajamas.

Foxx and Waltz are the right performers for these roles. Foxx is cold and calculated, downplaying his character’s brutality. And Waltz is electric as the moral and professional killer. He is given pages and pages of dialogue, all of it slithery and pliable, which gives Waltz plenty to work with to shape his devious dentist. By the time DiCaprio’s Candie makes an appearance I wasn’t sure if the script could hold him, but his dialogue rises to the occasion, giving Waltz material to weave around. I could listen to them talk circles around each other all day.

Django and Schultz wander through the Old West killing bounties until they finally find a way into Candie’s heart: they plan to pose as fight promoters of a specific kind of spectacle, black “Mandingo” fighters. This is a meta-reference to Richard Fleischer’s controversial 1975 Mandingo, and Tarantino drops the reference as if everyone has already seen it. Schultz and Django infiltrate Candie’s sprawling plantation, where they meet lots of champion fighters, Django’s whipped and broken wife (Kerry Washington), and Calvin Candie and his head servant/slave (Samuel L. Jackson), who might have forgotten what color his skin is in Candie’s intoxicating presence. They also meet the always-funny Walton Goggins, who can’t seem to wrap his brain around that D and J pairing: “I will you kill you Dee-Jango!”

The movie is full of slave imagery (including whippings and a dog mauling), brutal dialogue and roughly 100 or so utterances of the dreaded N word. It’s used by white and black characters, but the white characters use it in a snarly cadence that makes it sound much worse. In a historical context, the word was probably said a lot back then, but this is no Huck Finn and there is no deep lesson in its overuse. Tarantino uses it first to shock and then, after it’s been said a couple dozen times, to lull us into a numb daze. If saying the word takes its power away, then it is almost powerless by the end. Almost.

I’m trying to be sensitive in writing this review, though the film has no such worries: it is painfully blunt and so politically incorrect that it rates off the charts. Much of the humor is race-related juxtaposition: A black man on a horse!? A black man in a bar?! A black man in white peoples’ clothes?! Of course, no one says “black man,” though. As harsh as the dialogue is, Tarantino writes his black characters with warmth and affection. He’s also one of the few white people in American culture who can get away with this many N words (or even one), though I won’t entirely believe that until after the film’s been in general release for a couple of weeks. And though it can be lowbrow and cheap, Django Unchained also has a clever and slippery streak, like when Schultz wraps German folklore around Django’s wife and her experience as a slave in Mississippi. One image is especially poetic: a mist of blood spraying over the white cotton in a field. There is power, and poetry, in that visual.

Quentin Tarantino is fond to admit that he makes movies for himself — “Movies I would want to see,” he would say. Django Unchained might be Exhibit A in a case to prove that point. It’s filled with vile characters, horribly inappropriate dialogue and savage imagery, but it is pure Tarantino through and through. And though it may run a little long at nearly three hours, and Tarantino foolishly casts himself in a role, Django is an endlessly stylish adventure film that just so happens to take place at the same time as slavery.

And it just so happens to be totally ridiculous, in a good way. 

Brush up on your western trivia in Rango

Rango exists in a strange paradox: It’s animated, so children will naturally be interested, but it’s themed for adults with very mature references. Get a sitter or take the kids? Here’s a third option: take the sitter. They’ll appreciate Rango’s humor more than the kids.

And if you do take the little ones, expect them to ask questions after the movie. Like why did the doctor put on a rubber glove and stick his finger up in the air when the other character mentioned a sore prostate? “What’s a prostate? Tell us, daddy, please.” You’ll never hear the end of it from the backseat. Tell them what it is, in all the scary details, and you’ll never get them to the pediatrician again. You don’t tell them, and next thing you know they’re Googling “finger in prostate” — young eyes can’t un-see that.

Prostates don’t belong in films for children. Is that me coddling the children of the 21st Century? Maybe, but that’s not all that’s out of place in Rango, Gore Verbinski’s ode to westerns: swearin’, murderin’, tobaccy, cee-gars, references to other western films and the water-infused plot, which draws so heavily from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown that Robert Towne deserves a screenwriting credit. Adults will be amused; their children might be missing half the jokes.

Rango begins with an aquarium-based chameleon who fancies himself a master thespian. During a move, the little lizard (voiced with whimsy by Johnny Depp) is bumped from his aquarium and tossed into the Mojave Desert, where the local wildlife acts like they’re stars on an episode of Deadwood. The lizard adopts the name Rango — short for Durango, the name on a food label — and struts into town looking for water, the currency of the desert. He meets all kinds of grizzled beasts — bearded mice, spectacled tarantulas, wrinkly chickens, toothless horny toads — who fulfill all the western roles: shopkeeper, bartender, gunslinger, town drunk and bandits. A mariachi band of burrowing owls act as the film’s Greek chorus.

The character design and animation are terrific. The film has a one-of-a-kind look to it; the style is a mixture of photo-realistic textures with oddball animal caricatures. It's not as cartoony and vibrant as a Pixar; the animation is dirty and dusty like the Old West. The characters are harshly lit under the Nevada sun, creating dense shadows under hat brims and overexposed vistas over their shoulders. Indoors, the shadows dance around sunlight that falls through the windows and those swinging saloon doors. The look of Rango is that of a real western, which adds an authentic pop.

As Rango stumbles around town a mystery begins to unfold: a greedy turtle serving as the mayor — suspenders holding his shell up — may be hording the town’s water in some kind of nefarious plot to hike up the water rates. Rango takes out a posse (on riding roadrunners) to investigate, which results in double-crosses, a rattlesnake showdown, a chase with a covered wagon and a sequence with moles riding bats like they’re the air cavalry.

The voice casting is fun, though I tire tremendously of Johnny Depp doing Johnny Depp impersonations. Isla Fisher does a remarkable western shtick, as does Harry Dean Stanton and Alfred Molina. Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name makes a cameo, though he’s voiced by Timothy Olyphant doing a noteworthy Eastwood impression. If Slim Pickens were alive, he would have found himself right at home with all the crusty western talk. I really enjoyed Fisher's character, called Beans, who delivers a rapid-fire bumpkin speak: "Git yer fee-langes offa dem dare bottles."

I especially enjoyed the placement of music and sound effects throughout the film. “Ave Maria” as Rango falls from his aquarium is clever. A mariachi-tinted version of the Raising Arizona soundtrack (the song with the yodeling) plays during an enthusiastic hawk chase. “Ride of the Valkyries,” a parody of a similar scene in Apocalypse Now, plays during the bat air-assault. It’s overused in aerial sequences, but Wagner’s famous song somehow never gets old. And if you listen real carefully you’ll hear that famous windmill squeak from the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.

I enjoyed most of Rango, especially its western look, but it ran out of things to do just after the halfway mark. And it didn’t balance the humor through the entire film. Was it for adults or children? I’m still confused. A Pixar film would aim between the two, but Rango’s aim was a little high. Not that all films have to be Pixar films; it's just that Pixar has mastered its audience. Rango not sure who its audience is.