Hunter S. Thompson is apparently some genius that uses a variety of drugs and then writes books while he’s high. A regular Jim Carroll, but he wrote a book by the same title as this movie, and here it is. It follows the journey of Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp, Benny & Joon) a reporter for a magazine who goes to Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race. He is joined by his faithful legal assistant, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro, Snatch) who provides a strange and silent paranoid counterpart to Depp’s Hyperactive schizophreniac.
They go to bars, diners and hotels all over Vegas, frightening the locals, abusing the help, and impressing the tourists. They do all sorts of drugs, from your garden variety alcohols, to mescalin, to raw ether, to adrenachrome, or straight human adrenaline. They have a very dramatic and vivid variety of hallucinations, including a bar full of lizards, and a horde of bats circling their car.
The end is really all about America, and what makes a world the way it ought to be, and it gets pretty ridiculous, but for drug movies, this is definitely a winner, and a real tribute to the 60’s and 70’s, in the subject matter as well as the soundtrack.
Stars litter the screen in cameo’s, including Gary Busey, Christina Ricci, and Cameron Diaz. I give this movie a 2, just because it’s one of those movies you have to see, and you can say that you’ve seen it. It’s not as purposeful as Requiem for a Dream, and it’s not as raw as Trainspotting, and it’s not as silly as Half-baked, and it’s not as realistic as Basketball Diaries, but great performances and a witty edge on a strange plot makes this a winner.
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