Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998) ****1/2

The kids have this thing they do late at night on the weekends called Road Tripping. You go out in your vehicle and drive around all night drinking and smoking dope. Apparently it's a good old time, yet I don't know how safe it actually is. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a film about the ultimate road trip to Sin City with an unlimited supply of booze, drugs, and bullshit as two guys plot a collision course to disaster.

The film, base on Hunter S. Thompson's book, is the story of Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) which is actually Thompson's interpretation of himself and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) as they travel to Las Vegas for an article assigned to Raoul Duke. They load up their car an embark on a journey fueled by drugs and booze causing a normal working trip to Vegas to become a hallucinatory nightmare and a comment on the post hippie era in the United States.

Both Depp and del Toro fill their roles as we see them spiral out of control, hell they're already out of control when we meet them in the desert. Depp fills Thompson's shoes as an over the top drug hogging maniac that has temporary moments of clarity and comment on how Las Vegas has become a microcosm of American life. The pair are great at playing lunatics binging on the contents of their little brown briefcase.

The film is a really masterpiece in the way it's shot. Terry Gilliam, who is no stranger to odd films, creates a drugged out atmosphere that pulls you into the chemical haze, yet leaves the audience to realize how ridiculous Las Vegas actually was in that era. Pink encrusted rooms and acrobats on the gaming floor are not hallucinations- they're the real thing, even though it seems totally out of place in the situation.

The thing about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that it isn't just a film about road tripping. In between the the freak outs and stealing towels and soap the film really becomes a commentary about how the generation that felt that they changed the world in the 1960's somehow got derailed in the 1970's. The whole idea of freeing ones mind in the flower power era suddenly becomes excessive in the decade of excess. The film is more a commentary on what went wrong when the decade rolled over. When you really look at it Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas isn't as strange a tale as it seems. It's just enhanced a bit.