Gore Verbinski, the mind behind the OG Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, made headlines in 2026 with the release of his dark, anti-AI time travel comedy, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It received admirably decent reviews and can be called a wacky and enjoyable contribution to a timely discourse. But I promise you, it is not the weirdest thing the filmmaker has given us. That would be his only animated feature to date: Rango, a coarsely tongue-in-cheek cartoon western for which Verbinski brought along Pirates actors Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy.
Rango centers on a domestic lizard (Depp), who spends his days putting on plays about grand adventures with his non-sentient toys, before pondering his loneliness and lack of identity– that is, until a reckless driving incident throws his terrarium out of the back of a car and he finds himself barely surviving in the Mojave Desert. He lands in a small town called Dirt, inhabited by various anthropomorphic desert critters, whose economy has been ravaged by a drought. While the world surrounding this story is clearly contemporary, Dirt and its townsfolk are rooted in depictions of the Old West, complete with saloons, shoot-outs, and a rodent child sidekick named Priscilla (Abigail Breslin) modeled after True Grit’s Mattie. The town is also in desperate need of a lone, wandering hero, and the lizard claims to be such a figure and names himself Rango.
Where to start? Among other things, this movie is ugly. The setting and character designs are deliberately unpleasant, while the worldbuilding is nonsensical. Still, it’s certainly well-animated, with some appropriately epic mise-en-scene as the stakes ramp up. The score, by Hans Zimmer, is pretty sick, with a fantastic central melody (plus a few bars that sound very similar to pieces of the Pirates score). The Dirtians have a deadpan, juvenile sense of gallows humor that serves to illustrate their hazardous, gritty existence. You can’t say the film doesn’t go all-in on the whole Old West shtick, locking eyes with a dozen tropes in turn (including some possibly misguided satirization of more problematic ones). As Rango himself is an eager storyteller, he has his own ideas about the tale he is in, presumably shaped by iconic Old West movies. But even as he tries to impose archaic rules like keeping women out of his new posse, the story goes off its own rails, with characters like Beans (Isla Fisher) having none of it.
But in all seriousness, Rango is about a person (or a lizard) who has dreamed of being a hero for a long time realizing he has the freedom to remake himself however he likes in these new circumstances– only to be confronted with having to live up to the story he is telling. Rango seems to pick up the practical skills to be the lawman archetype along the way, but he truly comes into his own when he steps into the role of being their hero. Also, there’s a Mariachi band of burrowing owls who act as a Greek chorus throughout the whole thing, the leader of whom keeps insisting that Rango is going to die. He is wrong, because Rango is able to take control of his own story.
Dirt may not have gotten the memo about what year it is, but encroaching modern capitalism threatens the townsfolk with the (in essence) corporate seizure of life-sustaining resources. There is a startling contrast between the bulk of the movie’s aesthetics and the fact that the plot hinges on an understanding of plumbing, causing a problem that escapes the regular townsfolk and Rango is uniquely positioned to fix. What the townspeople rely on is semi-mythical stories like that of Rango, representing hope and the simple bravery of confronting evil directly. The gunslinger Rattlesnake Jake (Nighy) is initially framed as a villain, but because the real problem is the smoke and mirrors of shady businessmen, he is allowed a small redemption and comes to respect Rango as a fellow legend.
This all feeds into the mysterious plot point of the Spirit of the West (voiced by Timothy Olyphant). He is the nebulous representation of a Western hero, the spirit of survival, adventure, and courage, who journeys by “alabaster carriage with golden guardians” to protect him. Solitary, philosophical travelers like the armadillo Roadkill (Alfred Molina) embark on pilgrimages across the desert to find him; Rango eventually meets him in his darkest hour. And, he looks a lot like Clint Eastwood. He drives a white golf cart packed with golden statuettes that aren’t exactly Oscars, but that’s clearly what they are meant to invoke. Again, the boundary between the primary story and the implied human society is strangely blurry, the human appearance of the Spirit subverting our expectations.
Rango is just one of the zaniest concoctions ever that somehow works. Its vulgar and electric tone is original, albeit resorting to flirting with a less family-friendly rating to achieve that (it caused some commotion at the time of release for being a PG movie that depicts characters smoking). It is entirely indulgent in its own bizarre impulses as it swings between dirty jokes, unsettling visuals, and melancholic treatises on the sweeping nature of the desert itself.
Rango
2011
dir. Gore Verbinski
107 min.
Screens Saturday, 4/18, 12:20pm and Tuesday, 4/21, 4:25pm & 7:00pm @ Kendall Square Cinema
Part of the repertory series: Retro Replay: Animal Adventure Films
