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Critics Consensus: Visually creative, but also aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development.
Critic Consensus: Visually creative, but also aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development.
View All Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas News
All Critics (65) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (32) | Rotten (33) | DVD (16)
It's certainly distinctive, looking at times like Richard Lester put through a postmodernist blender.
(Gilliam's) vision is too reflexively comic to evoke the shadows of dread in Thompson's writing.
Pic serves up a sensory overload without any compensatory reflection on the outlandish and irresponsible behavior on view.
A film of brilliant moments, but sadly less coherent - and, on senses, rather less personal - than most of Gilliam's work.
It's really a series of sketches on one theme.
If you encountered characters like this on an elevator, you'd push a button and get off at the next floor. Here the elevator is trapped between floors for 128 minutes.
Unless viewed through the prism of psychedelic habituates, it is unlikely audiences will find much to savour in Gilliam's picture.
One of Terry Gilliam's worst films (almost unwatchable)
A peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.
Bizarre, unpredictable yet strangely alluring.
The film is intensely pretentious, far too clever for its own good.
It's larger-than life, wild, dizzy, colourful and vulgar, and goes round in circles - for a very long time.
A surrealist portrait, characters lost and visually innovative, a ride to a psychdelic, coloful and Las Vegas from Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing is great. Fresh.
Super Reviewer
It's visually appealing and has Depp and Del Toro at their craziest, however that's all that is carrying the film. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is wildly senseless and the plot is just as hallucinating as the symptoms of this drug-induced tirade. 2/5
Into and/or in search of the heart of the American dream, Raoul Duke(Depp) and his attorney(Del Toro) take a road trip to Las Vegas from Los Angeles where sportswriter Duke(Hunter S. Thompson) is to cover some races in the desert. Loaded up with large quantities of just about every illegal drug, alcohol and even grapefruit for an experience worthy of writing about. Add an invitation from the national conference of district attorneys to attend a four day seminar on narcotics and dangerous drugs and it makes things that much more interesting. This means loads of cops and from all over which just means there will be more to write about. Let's just not worry about the paranoia, it's all part of the journey here. Basically, it's an out of control experience of running on mescaline, LSD, speed, cocaine, large quantities of alcohol among other intoxicants turning Duke and Dr. Gonzo into complete madmen in a town that never sleeps. So you'd gather that it would be a rather bad trip, and you'd be right. But when it comes to "Gonzo Journalism", you do what it takes to get a story, whatever it may be; even if it is a story of no importance. "Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT. "Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ...and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon." Hunter S. Thompson
The visuals and general creativity continue to develop and thrive throughout, its a shame the story and characters don't.
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