Every few minutes, it seems, something is jumping off the lurid screen, whether it is the ever-present cigarette holder jutting from Duke's leering face or the limp head of a deer carcass on the hood of a jeep. The camera becomes, as it were, a third participant in Duke and Gonzo's debauchery, reeling, vibrating and distorting as the chemical vortex swallows them-and us-deeper and deeper into its altered state. and Vegas, which, according to Duke's voice-over narration, is just about "when the drugs kicked in." (That would be some or all of the following: beer, pot, coke, ether, acid, mescaline, an assortment of pills, and something called "adrenochrome.") From that point on, in fact, the drugs never kick out. The story catches up to their big, swerving convertible-known as the Red Shark-midway between L.A. Thompson is here represented by the character of Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp), while Acosta is called Dr. It's also a wide-angle snapshot of the great American dystopia-set against a background of Vietnam and social change-that occurred in what Thompson called "The Foul Year of Our Lord, 1971." Thompson's twisted-no, wrenched-roman a clef about his narcotic-filled journey to cover an off-road motorcycle race and a district attorneys' conference in the Nevada desert, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" delves much deeper than the literal level of personal dysfunction exhibited by him and his traveling companion, attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS CAST MOVIE
While not a great sensation-you may in fact feel like throwing up-it is a sign of great movie making, particularly when the movie is essentially about the limits to the variety and amount of pharmaceuticals that two individuals can consume without killing themselves.īased on Hunter S. The aftertaste of director Terry Gilliam's ferociously visual, visceral "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" lingers well past the closing credits, like a bad hangover. The fear is comical the loathing almost nonexistent.Johnny Depp stars in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is as genial and cuddly as a Thompson adaptation possibly could be. Instead, Depp gives us Thompson as court jester, someone to distract us from the duplicity of the world rather than expose it. And nowhere do we get a sense, as we do from Thompson’s writing, of his disgust at his own participation in the hypocrisy that bedevils America. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas does, very briefly, glance toward Vietnam, the Civil Rights battle and other instances of the era which exposed the American Dream, but these moments feel reluctantly crammed into the film, as if Gilliam didn’t want to harsh the overall mellow. The attention should be elsewhere, beyond Thompson’s histrionics and onto the external events and internal anguish that fueled his outlandish behavior. Watching Depp peck at a typewriter as if he’s a bird plucking worms from the dirt is briefly entertaining, but Gilliam lets this and similarly ostentatious moments drag on forever. And Gilliam, whose movies all resemble acid trips, offers little guidance. In Depp’s hands, mugging can be an art form, but it’s aggressively distancing here, as if you’re watching a party you haven’t been invited to.
The emphasis here is on grotesque hallucinations (some cleverly inspired by the novel’s original Ralph Steadman illustrations) and clowning on the part of Depp (as the Thompson stand-in) and Benicio del Toro (as his suspect attorney). Thompson.Īdapting Thompson’s druggy fictionalization of his reporting adventures in Las Vegas, director Terry Gilliam and star Johnny Depp indulge in the surrealism and mania that lies at the surface of that landmark piece of gonzo writing. It’s a trip, alright, but not one that has much to do with Hunter S.