In “Rango,” a theatrically-minded chameleon trying to find himself winds up stranded in a wild West-style desert town, so he fashions himself a new identity as Rango, the daredevil sheriff. But when the town’s water supply starts to dry up and Rango is forced to investigate, does he have the strength to live up to the life he has created for himself and save the day?

At first glance, “Rango” might appear to have a lot going for it. Directed by Gore Verbinski (“Pirates of the Caribbean”) and voiced by a number of famous stars, including Johnny Depp as the titular character, Isla Fisher and Abigail Breslin, the film is made up of several ingredients that should make for a successful and enjoyable animated flick. Unfortunately, “Rango” falls far short of its potential.

The biggest problem is that the film seems to have as much of an identity crisis as its main character. For starters, the humor tries to straddle the line between childish and adult, which ultimately renders it appealing to a very select audience. With few exceptions, the jokes directed toward kids are so standard and clichéd that even the most uncultured children would roll their eyes. Produced by Nickelodeon, the film naturally contains a number of instances of slapstick physical comedy: Characters are frequently hit over the head, back into cacti and fall from great heights. When the writers attempted verbal humor, they rely on perhaps the stalest jokes in the history of comedy, including the always not-funny standard of telling a character not to look down from a height (but then he does). At times, “Rango” is so boring that it seems like the filmmakers were coasting on the hope that Johnny Depp’s voice would be enough to keep you interested. As good as Depp is, even in voiceover, this is not the case.

While such banality wouldn’t mark out “Rango” as particularly bad, the humor directed at adults might be even worse. On top of a surprisingly heated vocabulary for a PG-rated film, certain lines are so jarringly inappropriate that you’ll spend more time wondering if the kids in the audience understood them than you will actually laughing. Among the topics covered in the film are prostate glands, mammograms and one mother’s “active social life.” Usually, animated films throw in a few lines of that nature as a small gift to the parents in the audience. In “Rango,” however, adult-level humor makes up the bulk of the jokes. Children will not understand it, and adults will be left more bewildered than amused. After all, if we’re watching a kids’ film whose opening lines contain the phrase “moist with apprehension,” should we laugh or be repulsed?

“Rango” also makes a number of references to other famous films, which, again, children will not understand. There is, of course, a reverential treatment of traditional Westerns, but with this homage come all the faults of Westerns, including fight scenes that go on far too long. Bizarrely, a huge plot point is an extended reference to the film “Chinatown,” which, however unsubtle it appears in the film, will most certainly go unappreciated by a younger crowd.

On the positive side, the film’s animation is fantastic. Its characters and landscapes are rendered in painstaking detail, and there are times when the background in particular seems more like a photograph than an animation. It appears, however, that the filmmakers spent the majority of their energy trying to make the characters as physically hideous as possible. For a children’s movie centered on talking animals, the lack of anything cute and cuddly is quite off-putting. One character, for example, is a bird with an arrow shot through his face; another is some type of shrew with a truly repulsive snout. The characters are so ugly, in fact, that it’s sometimes difficult to tell what kind of animal they’re supposed to be representing. The filmmakers likely thought that this general ugliness would contribute to a gritty, Western-style feeling. Again, that consideration is not likely to engage its target audience. Very young children might actually be frightened of a few sequences, particularly those featuring Rattlesnake Jake, one of the film’s antagonists.

Despite its famous voices and skillful animation, “Rango” flops because it cannot decide what kind of movie it is. It barely caters to the children, who should be most entertained by it, and its referential concessions to adults ultimately drag it down. Like the title character himself, the film puts on airs being something it shouldn’t be. Not even Depp can save it from its own mess.

Ian Opolski can be reached at [email protected].