Before he gets thrown from the back of a Gremlin and into a Wild West story befitting Sam Raimi, Rango has an aspiring actor (living in a fishtank) who has no idea who he is or what he's meant to be. The rest of the movie is about him playing and ultimately growing into the role of a hero -- same old, same old -- but it's a dark road, and he's set on it by a roadkill armadillo who's been run over and almost completely bisected. That sets the theme for the night, because throughout Rango's soul-searching adventure, he meets a vast menagerie of nearly dead animals, most of them half-starved, gruesomely disfigured or horrifically maimed. (The chicken with the arrow through his eye made me nauseous just looking at it, and I'm an adult.)

The story, in which Rango is made sheriff of the dying town of Dirt, leads him to investigate the drying up of the town's water source (water being both lifeblood and currency), the theft of the bank's dwindling supply, and the plans of the wheelchair-bound tortoise who runs the place and has eyes on development. Land development, kids! The movie itself is clearly an homage to Westerns like Pale Rider and Shane, where the farmer and gunfighter are being forced out by businessmen, plus the aforementioned Chinatown. There's even a little Star Wars in there, when Rango first visits the town's cantina. (Fitting, since ILM did the animation.) We only see a few humans in the movie, but they're the most blatant references of all -- early on, Rango bounces off the windshield of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and later he meets the Spirit of the West, a caricature of Clint Eastwood who drives a golf cart full of Oscars. It's a shame they couldn't get Eastwood himself to provide the voice, but Timothy Olyphant is a suitable substitute, given the amount of time we spend in the movie's own Deadwood-in-decline.

Besides Olyphant, the vocal cast is pretty impressive, with Ned Beatty, Ray Winstone, Alfred Molina, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin and Bill Nighy backing up Johnny Depp's Rango, who is played like a slightly less weird Willy Wonka, but with the occasional (okay, frequent) idiocy of his Tourist character. The characters have their stock equivalents -- the wise Native American, the grizzled prospector -- and the character designs are occasionally genius, walking chicken joke aside. Especially fun -- and scary -- is Nighy's gunfighter Rattlesnake Jake, who wears a series of bandoliers and has a rapidfire rattle made out of gun cylinders. His continued existence at the end, plus the film's blockbuster opening weekend, have me thinking he'll reappear in Rango 2: The Good, the Bad and the Uglier.

What if Rango was really entirely based on the life and works of Hunter S. Thompson?

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