Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a wild ride, but in the end, an unsubstantial one. The movie becomes slack when Raoul Duke/Hunter Thompson (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) go to Vegas for a second round; only bits and pieces match the zingy high of the first half, such as Thompson whipping his battered white Cadillac onto an airport runway, an ether walk (that Gilliam seems to have borrowed from his Monty Python days) and Thompson literally running into himself in San Francisco, 1965. The movie abandons the surreal social satire of the early scenes—the “electric snake” comes chiefly to mind—for not-so-subtle jabs at a square narc officer convention and muddled hoopla about the failure of the sixties and the American dream. This may be effective in the book, but in the movie the sixties spirit seems to have been squashed by meandering drug bingers like Gonzo and, to a lesser degree, Thompson. The fail-safe is that the movie is such a ripped quagmire that it seems to mean something, anyway—particularly if when you view the film, you’re going by its characters’ examples.
Regardless, the initial wackiness is as great as
