Metacritic reviews

Rango is wild, woolly and weird, and the first movie of 2011 that I must see again.

Rango is some kind of a miracle: An animated comedy for smart moviegoers, wonderfully made, great to look at, wickedly satirical, and (gasp!) filmed in glorious 2-D.

Wonderfully animated, witty and wildly imaginative.

Johnny Depp isn't the sort of star to blend in, so it's saying something that his turn as the world's most conspicuous chameleon in Rango is so full-bodied, you forget the actor and focus on the character.

Most exceptional is the visual style, which makes even the best animated 3D look like a poor cousin.

It's refreshing to see an animated movie that doesn't look as though the idea for the Happy Meal came first.

The biggest strike against Rango, though - for both the movie and the hero - is that the lizard is so damn ugly.

For all its genre-bending cleverness and technical dexterity, Rango's overstuffed plot fails to consistently blend its brainy pretensions with its chase-and-slapstick family-film obligations. Like Dirt's H2O supply, laughs are scarce.

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.