Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998)



When you get Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro in the same movie, and then get Terry Gilliam to direct it, you set yourself up for an exceptionally high-quality film. When that film is based on the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, you seen almost predestined for true greatness. Why is it, then, that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fails on almost every level? Simple: because the insanely convoluted script (the story of the genesis of which is even more insanely convoluted than the script itself) takes Thompson's bitter, crazed, hysterically funny satire of American life and turns it into a generic, intensely stupid drug comedy. Granted, it's one with an incredible cast and a usually brilliant director, but make no mistake, 12 Monkeys or Brazil this ain't.



Depp plays Raoul Duke, Hunter Thompson's alter ego, while del Toro is Dr. Gonzo, Thompson's traveling companion and legal aid. (I had always assumed Dr. Gonzo to be based on cartoonist Ralph Steadman, thanks to Thompson's wonderful Kentucky Derby essay, in which Steadman behaves exactly like, well, Dr. Gonzo; the liner notes inform me that Gonzo is instead based on Oscar Zeta Acosta.) They roll into Vegas to cover the Mint 400, a dirt-bike race, and miss everything but the very start thanks to their heavy ingestion of controlled (and uncontrolled) substances. After losing Gonzo along the way, Duke flees Vegas, only to find out, when he calls Gonzo from a pay phone, that Gonzo has set him up another assignment-- covering a police convention focused on what we now know as the War on Drugs. There's a potential vein of humor here that cannot be overstated. Somehow, Gilliam's (and Tony Girsoni's and Tod Davies' and Alex Cox's) script misses it entirely.



It's impossible to watch Johnny Depp on a screen and not like him, but this is about as close as I've ever come. (Okay, it's tied with Secret Window.) And I've seen del Toro play drugged-out maniacs before and liked it a lot better. Usually, either of them can save even the most wooden script, though I admit even del Toro's remarkable talent couldn't help The Way of the Gun. So what went wrong here? I think a great deal of the problem is that Gilliam, in both the script (though how much of it he's actually responsible for we'll probably never know) and the direction, takes Thompson's source material far too seriously. (It's telling that the funniest line in the movie was actually ad-libbed by Gary Busey.) Fifteen minutes in, the movie has already become repetitive-- take drugs. Attempt to be funny. Take drugs. Attempt to be funny. Repeat ad nauseam, sometimes literally. All the ingredients are here for this to have been a great movie. There's a cast of thousands, many of whom are instantly recognizable (aside from the above, Harry Dean Stanton, Ellen Barkin, Verne Troyer, Tim Thomerson, Christina Ricci, Laraine Newman, Michael Jeter, Penn Jillette, Christopher Meloni, Lyle Lovett, and many others put in small appearances). There's a fantastic book at the heart of this. There's a brilliant director-- or, at least, one who used to be. (It's equally telling that after this, he went silent for a number of years; his next outing was the critical failure The Brothers Grimm, in 2005.) And yet somehow it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Amazon reviewer Jeff Shannon accurately predicted that the movie would "achieve some modest cult status over the years", but for the life of me, I can't understand why. *