Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
(1998)
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FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS is a whirlwind of a movie, a wacky, drug-laden story backed by a fist-pumping rock & roll soundtrack featuring everything from Wayne Newton and Tom Jones to Combustible Edison and Dead Kennedys. Journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) heads to Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, bringing along his Samoan lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), in this furious adaptation of the book by Hunter S. Thompson. It is 1971, and Duke and Gonzo are on their way to Sin City with a frightened hitchhiker (a nearly unrecognizable Tobey Maguire) and a trunkful of drugs, which they ingest nonstop. Depp is terrific as Duke, Thompson's alter ego, and Del Toro is a riot as the crazy lawyer. To perfect his Thompsonian performance, Depp spent a lot of time with the good doctor, and it paid off in a film that captures the frenetic pace of the counterculture novel. Director Terry Gilliam, a master of complex, bizarre visual imagery, has a field day interpreting the drug-hazed world in which Duke and Gonzo reside. An all-star cast chimes in with wonderfully offbeat bit parts, including Harry Dean Stanton, Gilliam regular Katherine Helmond, Flea, Cameron Diaz, Ellen Barkin, Christina Ricci, Gary Busey, Lyle Lovett, and others. |
Already a novel with a life of its own, this was always going to be a challenging experiment, even for maverick director Terry Gilliam (who replaced Alex Cox in pre-production). Hunter S Thompson's distinctive prose survives nearly intact and, although Johnny Depp brings an amusingly and effectively twitchy energy to the role of gonzo journalist Raoul Duke, this brave film falls just short of capturing the book's errant vibrancy. Less a road movie than a tale of two “trippies”, it admirably resists the temptation to go morph crazy. The pace is a bit too fast to fully allow the audience to clamber on board, however, so one can only watch in bemused admiration as it zooms past.