Film
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Director
- Terry Gilliam
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 118 mins
Many critics detested Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing, but it’s worth reviewing their objections to the film, which seem to be that it’s (a) rambling and confused, (b) “the most vile and twisted movie ever made by a Hollywood studio”, and (c) a reprehensible celebration of ‘70s drug culture. To which one can only respond: (a) so’s the book, (b) haven’t these people seen Problem Child? and (c) why don’t you airbrush away Brunel’s cigar while you’re at it?
From Johnny Depp’s familiar opening voiceover, “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” the first surprise is how faithful the much-reworked script is to Hunter S. Thompson’s barking narrative. Anyone who’s ever loved the book will find themselves unconsciously chanting along with the dialogue. But this fidelity to its source almost proves to be the film’s undoing. When foaming hack Raoul Duke (Depp) and his disgusting porcine attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) are speeding down that highway with a car full of drugs and that hapless hippy hitchhiker on the back seat, Gilliam meets the challenge of Duke’s bat hallucinations by conjuring up . . . a flock of animated bats. It’s an over-literal lapse from which the film takes a while to recover, but such is the breakneck speed with which we race along on that fabled “savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” that we’re soon plunged into a gloriously tacky and unreal Las Vegas, with Duke doing his best beleaguered war correspondent amid the gaudy neon and formidable cocktail of pharmaceuticals as the horrors of ‘Nam unfold on his telly.
This is not, as Gilliam readily concedes, a film for everyone. Always a brilliant visual stylist, he really excels with the hallucinogenics – all crawling carpets and leathery mutants, plus a sensory overload at the circus – and then hits you hard with The Horrors as the hedonistic twosome neck the adrenochrome at the narcs’ convention and retreat into their foul lair to sweat it out. Depp barks his lines through gritted teeth as he struggles to cling on to his cigarette holder throughout, his tic-laden performance occasionally breaching the irritation threshold despite its much-vaunted accuracy. The madness in Benicio del Toro’s Method, meanwhile, would appear to have comprised an arduous evening spent in front of old Cheech and Chong vids. To dismiss the film’s pre-PC sensibilities as ‘dated’ is to miss the point (nobody makes the same objection to costume dramas) and all its faults are inherent in the book. You can argue that it couldn’t or shouldn’t have been filmed but it has, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone making a better job of it than Gilliam.
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