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Indeed, the trip turns a lot scarier once the action retreats to the pair’s dark and increasingly trashed hotel suite.
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This small classic of physical comedy is so deftly played and excruciatingly funny, you may reasonably fear that the movie has peaked too soon.
The sequence in which they dose themselves with ether and surrender all motor skills to enter Bazooko Circus is a grunt-and-lurch ballet choreographed for Jovian gravity. But nothing equals the jabbering gesticulations of Depp and Del Toro’s stoned minuet.
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The Fisher King showed him to be the only director in history to handle Robin Williams’s personality at full throttle Brad Pitt gave a career performance as a borderline lunatic in 12 Monkeys. Gilliam is an inspired conductor of manic behavior. (In another of the film’s cameos, a nearly unrecognizable Tobey Maguire appears as the stupefied hippie hitchhiker picked up and traumatized by Duke and Gonzo.)
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Depp thinks, Del Toro acts: it’s he who gets to puke out a car window at a parallel vehicle filled with uptight squares, who gets to woo catatonic runaway Christina Ricci, and gets to woof TV reporter Cameron Diaz in a scene of claustrophobic elevator terror. From the moment he begins braying “One Toke over the Line” to the scene he plays opposite hard-boiled waitress Ellen Barkin in an exaggeratedly realistic North Las Vegas diner, Del Toro is a force of nature. Gonzo, Benicio Del Toro-no less ambitiously unpredictable in his career choices than Depp-is given ample room to pulverize the screen.ĭepp proves himself a master of moving as though someone has just pulled the plug on his power source, but the movie’s edge is provided by Del Toro, who gained forty pounds for the part and honed a paranoid glare sharper than the hunting knife he regularly brandishes. Depp, no less than Thompson, is a southern gentleman-and his stoned pratfalls and coke-snort double takes notwithstanding, he’s also an exemplary straight man. His is the detached cool of a nineteenth-century explorer or a 1920s bon vivant. Gilliam gleefully stages Thompson’s panicky experience of the hotel cocktail lounge-“We’re right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody’s giving booze to these goddamn things!”-adding to the comedy by flipping in and out of his hero’s drastically expanded consciousness.īill Murray made an embarrassing stab at playing Thompson in Art Linson’s 1980 Where the Buffalo Roam, but Johnny Depp, here given the Thompson alias Raoul Duke, has the attitude as well as the look-receding hairline, sporty pith helmet, orange aviator shades, jaunty cigarette holder. The dope-addled search for America will be three days in Vegas, and a twilight arrival in Glitter Gulch occasions the definitive LSD sequence in Hollywood movies-a farrago of glacially delayed responses, free-floating incomprehension, inadvertent word repetitions, and minor visual distortions blossoming into full-fledged hallucinations. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” is the line with which both book and movie begin (the gonzo equivalent of “Call me Ishmael”). Like a belated sequel to Easy Rider, Fear and Loathing opens with two guys in Hawaiian shirts and a red convertible bombing, born to be wild, toward Nevada’s neon Sodom. But, having taken over the project from Alex Cox, Terry Gilliam returned from the desert bringing the multiplex nation a slapstick fever dream both funny and poignant, as unencumbered in its performances as it is uncompromising in its worldview. Dispatched by a national magazine to cover a cross-country motorcycle race, Thompson filed a postmortem on the sixties counterculture, while reporting on his brain as though it were the dark side of the moon.Īs extravagantly subjective, linguistically rich, and outrageously bad-behaved as Fear and Loathing is, this lysergic tall tale, which was first published in Rolling Stone in late 1971, would seem to be problematic Hollywood material at best.
Thompson’s journalistic prose poem Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas used a lost weekend in Las Vegas as a metaphor for America’s season in hell.