Movie review: 'Rango' is a fun story of good heart

In fact, the title character of “Rango” vaguely resembles Thompson somehow, albeit in the form of a chameleon with an asymmetrically-shaped head, crooked pencil-thin neck, frightfully bulging eye sockets and pinpoint irises. He is wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt, though, which Thompson often favored.

And our hero even speaks with the voice of Johnny Depp, who portrayed the gun-toting scribe in the film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Working from a hilariously quirky and inventive script by John Logan (“Gladiator,” “The Last Samurai,” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”), Gore Verbinski, who’s directed Depp in three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, fashions an homage to — and a poke at — the mythos created by the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.

Rango is a sheltered family pet who is doomed to forever “blend in,” as most chameleons do, which is at the root of his raging identity crisis and his burning ambition to be an actor. When a highway mishap during a long-distance move leaves him stranded in the middle of the desert, he ends up in the gritty, lawless town of Dirt, which is populated by all manner of creatures furry and scaly, walking and crawling, great and small.