It’s been 20 years (!) since John McTiernan, the filmmaking behind such immortal classics as “Die Hard,” “Predator” and “The Hunt for Red October,” last made a movie. Now someone please bankroll his space cats movie. There’s a chase sequence involving characters riding bats, runaway buggies and dynamite, all set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” that will make your eyes pop out of your head. And the kinetic, complicated action set pieces that Verbinski conjures so beautifully in live-action (we’re looking at you, train-chase-in-“The Lone Ranger”) are even more intricate and ornate in animation. You’ve really never seen anything like “Rango.” The animation was handled by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects arm of Lucasfilm (now owned by Disney), and the characters have a gritty idiosyncratic style thanks to an art department led by the great illustrator Mark “Crash” McCreery. Johnny Depp stars as Rango, a chameleon who wants to be an actor, who winds up in a dusty western town called Dirt and uncovers a “Chinatown”-style conspiracy and must face off against assorted dastardly villains. You know, that old chestnut.) The news of a canceled Verbinski animated feature is only amplified if you revisit “Rango,” his Oscar-winning film from 2011. One of the great tragedies of last year was that Netflix pulled the plug on a new animated feature from Gore Verbinski, the filmmaker behind the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and offbeat cultish fare like “The Weather Man” and “A Cure for Wellness.” (It was supposedly about singing cats in outer space.

Pirates 2005 streaming