Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1999) 1/2 * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is one of the worst movies by a director of significance that I have ever seen. It's shameful that such an amazing book could be transformed -- by an excellent director -- into a movie of such appalling emptiness and shapelessness. It's not even a good lousy movie. More below the belt than that I can't get.
Ostensibly drawn from Hunter S. Thompson's seminal work of the same name, "Fear and Loathing" gives us Raoul (Johnny Depp, unrecognizable and damn near incoherent with that cigarette holder wedged in his mouth) and Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) as drug-addled journalists who have allegedly been sent to cover a bike race out near Vegas. They stick around after that to also examine (if that's the word) a convention of district attorneys, and take drugs. Lots of drugs.
I quote: "We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing more irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we would be getting into that rotten stuff sooner or later."
Raoul and Gonzo consume most of this chemical smorgasbord through the course of the movie, and the audience is forced to watch the results. At first there is the hint of something wicked going on, like when they try to con their way into a Debbie Reynolds performance by giving the usher a toot, but then the same pattern is repeated, without any real variation or insight, until we are left with something that cannot even be watched for more than a few minutes at a time without cringing.
What we have is not so much a movie about drugs as it is a movie that simply contains drugs. There's no point of view, no insight, and not a hint of wit or genuine examination of character. There is just Raoul and Gonzo getting into one stoned mess after another. Cheech and Chong used to make movies like this, too, but the saving grace was that they were intermittently funny. "Fear and Loathing" isn't.
Much noise has been made about "Fear and Loathing" being a dissection of "Straight" America during the dog-end of the Sixties. Horse manure. Gilliam does this by ineptly throwing some stock footage of Sixties protests at us, and by having everyone in the movie who's an "Establishment" person be an asshole. But Raol and Duke are scarcely any less assholes themselves, so what's the point?
I like Gilliam as a director; every now and then he pulls himself together for a really virtuoso movie like "12 Monkeys." Here, he was apparently drafted in after the original director, Alex Cox, left; I suspect Cox, whose movies include the amazing "Repo Man", would have been able to REALLY make something scary and anarchic out of this material. In Gilliam's hands, what we have is barely even intelligible as a movie.
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