Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Director: Terry Gilliam
Cast:
Johnny Depp
Benecio Del Toro
Gary Busey
Christina Ricci
Cameron Diaz

As I've droned before, drug movies are notoriously hard to pull off. So often used as a metaphor for "this guy's outta control and headed for a fall," it's become the cheapest method of foreshadowing outside of a good thunderstorm. It's no coincidence, then, that Hunter S. Thompson's savage "Fear and Loathing" was deemed "unfilmable" for lo these 27 years, but if anybody's going to do it, you have to make way for Terry Gilliam.

Known for his fantastical work in "Brazil," "Twelve Monkeys" and all of his Monty Python cartooning, Gilliam throws himself into this one with the same wide-eyed visuals and reality vacuoles that makes all of his movies err delightfully on the side of Idea Overload. Thompson's novel is ripe for such picking; the story of Raoul Duke's trip to Las Vegas with his oafish attorney Dr. Gonzo is so fraught with euphoric/demonic language that this movie didn't need a director, it needed a Renaissance painter that specializes in diseases of the flesh.

Duke is sent to Las Vegas to cover a bike race, but after a sheet of acid, handfuls of mescalin pills and seemingly hundreds of other drugs that are too strong to clean toilets, you start to wonder how Thompson himself ever made a deadline. Johnny Depp imitates Thompson perfectly—all the tics, jitters, weird speech patterns and Southern gentlemanliness that make up the most freaked-out protagonist in history. Benicio Del Toro, bloated 45 pounds and barfing, is a revelation as the amoral Dr. Gonzo—he is the human id personified.

I'll be honest; the flick ain't for everybody. The constant drug use can get to you after a while, and there's times when you start to feel a sort of empathetic nausea for the characters. But if you're up for the trip, it's a gorgeous and swirly delight, a human sundae with a side of cerebro-spinal fluid. Even the slower spots, where Duke waxes romantic about the "high water mark" he saw back in the '60s, could sound dated, but they don't: if anyone gets to feel sad about the way his generation ended up, Hunter S. Thompson does. He said it best, and he said it first. He saw it all in its horrifying perspective even in the nascent "me" year of 1971. By the film's end, you wonder how anyone got through those years without a jar of ether and a crinkled-up American flag.

Like the man says, "buy the ticket, take the ride..."

—Ian Williams

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