"We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way to the end..." (Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (DVD))

Name: Fu-Manchu

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Product:	Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (DVD)
Date:	07/12/00 (112 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Insane visuals, great comic peformances...

Disadvantages: Difficult for those unfamiliar with source novel.

The question was: what would my favourite director make of my favourite author's most famous book? Gilliam had the credentials - from his insane Monty Python animations, through the neo-nostalgic dystopia of Brazil, the calamitous, unruly genius of Baron Munchaussen...who else had the visual flair to translate Thompson's novel to the screen? (A version by Peter Greenaway would have been interesting...)

What plot there is concerns Gonzo journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) on a drug-guzzling mission to Vegas in order to report on the Mint 500, a desert bike race. He takes his criminally insane attorney (Benicio Del Toro) along for the ride, and, on finding the race to be a total farce, jettisons the story and embarks on an odyssey of seriously anti-social behaviour.

Johnny Depp goes bald as the young Thompson, contorting himself from heart-throb to drug-crazed lunatic fairly successfully. Del Toro is virtually unintelligible as the maniac attorney. Their antics will be totally nonsensical to anyone who hasn't read the book...

...although that isn't necessarily a problem. While Gilliam has laced the visuals with his usual hallucinogenic energy, he doesn't really trust them to stand alone. Maybe he heard Fear and Loathing get called an "unfilmable text" one too many times - and combatted the problem by having Depp virtually read the whole novel as a slurring voice over.

All the book's highlights are here - the frenzied blast across the desert in their fireapple red convertible; gatecrashing a Debbie Reynolds concert; staggering into Circus-Circus on ether; infiltrating a DEA conference; intimidating a waitress in a grotty cafeteria.

For all the drugs and puke and guns and madness, the essential poignancy of the book still emerges. Here are two refugees from the Sixties, staggering blinking into the darker era of Nixon's seventies. They are sick in the knowledge that the previous
decade's love and energy came to nothing, and are powerless to do anything about it.

About as complete as you could expect a version of Thompson's work to be...hilarious for those in the right frame of mind, sprawling nonsense for those who aren't.

Summary: