Rango is Dark, Creepy and Not Much Fun

Ok, I know there’s an issue with a kid movie if I dream about it the night I’ve seen it. It’s bugging me. It seeped into my subconscious mind.

We took our whole brood to see the new Johnny Depp movie “Rango” (www.rangomovie.com) yesterday – opening weekend – because they were so excited to be able to tell their friends they saw it.

Afterwards, all of them said, “That’s was good,” but not with the usual enthusiasm I’ve come to expect from going to movies. For example, when we saw “Gnomey and Juliet” recently, they walked out saying “That’s my new favorite movie!” and “That was awesome.”

This one, not so much.

The Story: Rango, after getting lost from his owners, has made it to the desert town of Dirt, where he discovers something fishy about the water supply. Their town is drying up but the mayor doesn’t seem to be suffering the effects. For some reason the town is set in the Old West, even though moments before, we saw the chameleon Rango fall out of the back of a moving car on the highway.

The first scene involves Rango, voiced by Depp, getting pitched out of the back of his owners’ car, along with the strange, broken toys from his aquarium. For some reason, he wears a Hawaiian shirt.

He’s lying there, bewildered on the highway, and beside him on the blacktop, is an armadillo who has been run over. While there is no blood, he is cut in two. They have a strange, quasi-philosophical conversation, all while seeing this animal divided in half.

Moments before that, Rango was hitting on a headless torso of a “fashion doll” who is shirtless and Rango asks, looking at her chest, “Are those real?”

After both of these incidents, I actually took my phone out in the theater (oh my!) and looked up what the movie was rated (PG), because I thought, “If this is the way the entire movie goes, we’re in trouble,” for at least half our group, which ranges in age from almost 3 to 15.

The movie is filled with jokes they try to make funny for the adults watching but even we were cringing many times. One joke involves something about a leaky prostate. Not funny for adults, certainly not appropriate for kids, if they even know what a prostate is.

Also, while it is rated PG for “Rude Humor, Action, Language and Smoking” I was actually more concerned with the gun play and death.  The villainous Rattlesnake Jake, voiced by Bill Nighy, is a rattlesnake whose rattler is actually a machine gun and his cylindrical body is covered with additional ammunition. He does use this gun, a lot, and even kills one of the characters. Another villain, a hawk, is actually crushed to death and they show his splayed out wings under a pile of rubble. Not exactly the cut away innuendo of most kid movies…

The characters are creepy, to say the least. One character is a seagull who has been shot with an arrow through one of his eyes, and the arrow remains. Another character, a mole, who may have stolen the town’s precious water supply, has a disturbing shriveled nose. One of the main characters, Beans, voiced by Isla Fisher, is a strange-looking lizard with curly-cue hair who has the odd tendency to randomly freeze for no apparent reason beyond “It’s a defense mechanism,” she says. Those moments are uncomfortable…

At one point, the Dirt posse that has been searching out the town’s stolen water jug gets surrounded by an army of ground-dwelling characters who pop out of holes from the desert floor. They are all so bizarre-looking – grey, tattered clothes, small eyes – I felt for a second like I was watching a scene from “The Lord of the Rings” during the fights with the strange Orc army. I actually looked at my youngest to see if he was frightened or not.

So, strange character, inappropriate humor, death, decay, a stretched storyline and a couple of bizarre surreal dream-like sequences that make no sense fill this movie. An animated Clint Eastwood is a nice touch for us old folks but his presence makes almost no sense in the context of the movie, and certainly will be lost on most kids.

I’ve seen several reviews giving this movie 3 out of 4 stars. These reviewers most likely didn’t watch this movie with their kids.  After dinner, almost every one of our kids finally admitted, “That was kind of creepy.” I’d give it one star. Nighy’s voice of the evil rattler, who is inexplicably British, was the highlight for me. I’d love to hear your thoughts though – please comment if you’ve seen it.

Screen shot: Paramount Pictures