![]() There is an outside chance the film might have worked as a down-and-dirty, on-the-fly low-budgeter such as Rhino originally envisioned it with Alex Cox as director, but the slickness and sheer weight of the current production bog down its flights of fancy rather than liberate them. ![]() Shot with queasy-making, distorting wide-angle lenses and filled with frenetic activity and a torrent of mostly nonsensical dialogue, pic serves up a sensory overload without any compensatory reflection on the outlandish and irresponsible behavior on view. Your Flick Filosopher - who actually did live in a house with a white picket fence as a child - likes it up here on her high horse.“This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs,” Depp’s spaced-out journo Raoul Duke quips at one despairing moment, and the excess of mind-boggling amounts of substance abuse piled upon the built-in excess of Vegas proves equally debilitating for the viewer. In other words, let us not forget that your everyday, greed-is-good American is all too willing to clamp down on the bad guys’ vices - be it marijuana or cocaine or what have you - as long as you leave his vices - booze and cigarettes - alone.Īnd let’s face it: Is Thompson’s quick high really all that different from that of the blue-haired old lady mesmerizing by the one-armed bandit? When Thompson and friend wander into a district attorneys’ conference on drug abuse, they are treated to the usual “dope fiend” hysteria - fed to an audience of D.A.s all puffing away on that legal narcotic, tobacco. Look at all the fools willing to throw their money away on Powerball.īut that’s only the first level of irony. But after more consideration, one might stumble upon the notion - as I did - that Vegas truly is representative of the dream many Americans have: the something-for-nothing, quick-and-easy-money, greed-is-what-made-this-country-great path to enlightenment, with some half-naked women wearing ostrich feathers on the side, thank you very much. One’s first reaction might be that the traditional American dream - the whole white-picket-fence thing - is diametrically opposed to the sleaze and greed of Vegas. Thompson is constantly blathering on about finding the American dream in Vegas (which is hardly less pyschotropic than Thompson’s chemicals) - ironic on two levels. What the movie lacks in plot it makes up for in irony. ![]() But mostly they spend their little holiday pumping their bodies full of increasingly bizarre intoxicants, trashing hotel rooms, threatening the help, and terrifying little girls. to Las Vegas, ostensibly for journalist Thompson to cover a motorcycle race. If you consider Las Vegas sane.īasically plotless and almost impossible to watch at times, Fear and Loathing follows Thompson (the always interesting Johnny Depp) and his lawyer ( The Usual Suspects‘ Benicio Del Toro) on a psychedelic weekend romp from L.A. If you consider someone who’s never not high insane. Whereas most of his films focus on a sane man in an insane world - Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys, Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, the little boy in Time Bandits - Fear and Loathing focuses on an insane man, Hunter S. I mean, really: They shouldn’t be allowed to make movies like this, or everyone will want to join the fun and exciting world of illegal narcotics abuse.ĭirector Terry Gilliam has done a sort of about-face with Fear and Loathing. Boy, I thought Trainspotting was enough to put me off drugs forever.įear and Loathing in Las Vegas puts Trainspotting to shame when it comes to exposing the glamorous drug culture: the daily vomiting, the wallowing in your own filth, the insane paranoia, the sickening hallucinations, the waking up with a lizard tail strapped to your butt. ![]()
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