Their vision of a Vegas bar as a literal lounge for lizards (courtesy of mon-ster makeup ace Rob Bottin) accentuates the in-your-face visual approach meant to convey altered consciousness, but the boys are just warming up grass, booze, mescaline, acid, et al., are nothing compared with ether if you want to lose total control, which they do in a subsequent freak-show sequence. Gonzo arrive in the desert city - where mere possession of marijuana can get you 20 years - and o.d.

The nature of this sort of protest seems less meaningful today than it did then, and the picture does little to make it relevant or plausible for a modern perspective.ĭipping liberally into the drugstore in the trunk of their red Chevy convertible even before they reach their destination, the trim, vacation-wear-attired Duke and the grossly overweight and disheveled Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) ostensibly to cover the off-road Mint 400 motorcycle race but actually, in a larger sense, to rebel against what they see as the plastic, hypocritical nightmare of Nixon’s America by becoming as wasted as possible. to Vegas with his attorney and partner-in-crime Dr. Some cryptic narration and more than two dozen pop tunes of various vintages provide a fragile frame for the indulgent spree of sports-writer Duke, who drives from L.A. 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.

“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.

The fear and loathing in las vegas