Rango At Number One, But Is It Any Good? (VIA)

Is Gore Verbinski's animated western worth its $38 million (estimated) gross?

Since the first trailer debuted last year, Rango has been hyped as a different kind of movie. First it was promoted as a semi-silly action-comedy. Then it was promoted as an animated feature for adults. During the Super Bowl, Paramount VIA aired a 30-second promo that showed the film's lighter side, which was no doubt designed to reach the younger masses tuning into the big game.

By opening weekend, Rango had been promoted to nearly every mainstream demographic imaginable.

But as we've learned so many times before, no feature can entertain every moviegoer. Any studio or filmmaker that pretends otherwise is destined to be disappointed.

Unfortunately, both Paramount and director Gore Verbinski are guilty of pretending.

Conceptually, Rango is somewhat of a brilliant twist on the western genre. By replacing the usual western setting with desert creatures – lizards, snakes, bats, birds and bugs, to name a few – Rango easily stands apart not only from its direct competition within the western genre, but also from the many animated movies that are scheduled for release this year.

Considering what he had to work with, Johnny Depp's performance is decent, if not a little bland. As Rango, Depp plays an aspiring actor who, after being separated from his human owners, wanders into an old town in the Wild West. Hoping to receive a degree of adoration from his new neighbors, Rango leads them to believe that he is a dangerous gunslinger who took out a pack of seven gangsters with only a single bullet. His cockiness gets him intro trouble, especially when the mayor (an old turtle voiced by Ned Beatty) begins to notice Rango's true potential.

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Isla Fisher (who voices Beans) and Abigail Breslin's (who voices Priscilla) presence in the film, but make no mistake: Rango is a Johnny Depp movie. The other characters are secondary at best.

Harnessing the power of Industrial Light & Magic (the George Lucas animation studio behind the special effects of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and countless others), Rango is, without question, the most realistic animated movie of the year. One look at the finished feature and it is clear that Paramount spared no expense in making every character look good enough to leap off the screen – so good, in fact, that many viewers will wonder why the film isn't being offered in 3D.

That realism and unrivaled beauty, however, is where Rango's problems begin to shine through. Whereas most animated features pull back on the level of realism (ex: Pixar's (NYSE: DIS) Toy Story franchise looks like a cross between the real world and a 3D cartoon), Rango's visuals are a no-holds-barred experience. Case in point: when a trail of swerving automobiles leads to the literal flattening of an armadillo, it's hard to watch the scene and laugh. If the armadillo had the exaggerated appearance of a cartoon character (like Shrek or any other DreamWorks DWA character), his predicament might have been hilarious. But I did not laugh. Instead, I felt sorry for the helpless armadillo, and I don't think that's the emotion that Verbinski was trying to create.

As one of the earlier scenes of the film, this uncomfortable contrast – silly scenarios with characters that are all too real – left a bad taste that was hard to ignore. Had this scene been followed by something sweeter, that taste might have been easy to forget. But it was followed by action (the hawk chase sequences are wonderful), violence (one character is murdered), and tasteless jokes (four birds hang from nooses while singing about the fate of the murder suspects).

Though one could argue that this is no different from Pixar and DreamWorks' interjection of adult humor, the truth is that Rango goes too far. While I doubt that the film will scare many of its younger viewers, the reality is that it was not made for kids and should not have been marketed to them.

On Friday night, there were a lot of children in the theater. They laughed once.

At its core, Rango is a western designed for western lovers. The film is packed with references to other films within the genre, including a few that are tailor-made for fans of Clint Eastwood.

Something tells me, however, that most western fans would prefer watching True Grit instead. Rango isn't a bad movie. But it isn't a great one either. It had the potential to break new ground as a genre-defining action-comedy. But while the original Pirates of the Caribbean did exactly that, Verbinski's latest adventure misses the mark – both for the adults Rango desperately wants to entertain, and especially for the kids who were deceived by a misleading ad campaign.