`FEAR' IS GONZO ALL THE WAY

Depp's altered state gets tiresome

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS: Farce. Starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del
Toro. Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni,
Tod Davies and Alex Cox. (R. 119 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

In 1971, when Hunter S. Thompson wrote ``Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,''
drug humor was commonplace in pop culture. Cheech and Chong turned pot
jokes into a mini-industry, rock stars celebrated chemical experimentation
and movies equated casual drug use with hipness and rebellion.

Today, more than a decade after Nancy Reagan's ``Just Say No'' campaign
made drug humor disappear, it's amazing that Thompson's rude, brilliant
blast of a novel has been transferred to the screen --with all its
psychedelic humor, baroque language and excessive drug use intact.

``Fear and Loathing,'' opening today at Bay Area theaters, stars Johnny
Depp as Thompson's alter ego, wildcat journalist Raoul Duke, and features
Benicio Del Toro (``The Usual Suspects''), who gained 40 pounds for the
role, as Dr. Gonzo, Thompson's attorney and fellow prankster.

Both men give mischievous, out-on-a-limb performances, and the movie is
directed with tremendous visual imagination by Terry Gilliam, whose earlier
films, ``Twelve Monkeys,'' ``The Fisher King'' and ``Brazil,'' also dealt
with illusion and madness, social transgression and altered states.

But even with such gifted creators, brilliant production design and several
moments that capture the wobbly sensations of an acid trip better than
anything since Oliver Stone's ``The Doors,'' ``Fear and Loathing'' is
disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

It's really a one-gimmick movie that declares its intentions in the first
scene, as Depp and Del Toro rage down a desert highway, top down on their
fire-engine red Chevy convertible, a ``whole galaxy'' of drugs and --
booze, ``uppers and downers, laughers and screamers'' stashed inside.

``We were somewhere around Barstow,'' Depp says in voice-over, ``when the
drugs began to take hold.''

From that moment until the movie ends two hours later, we get one warped,
druggy, filmed-through-a-funhouse-mirror sequence after another. Checking
into a Las Vegas hotel, where Depp is supposed to cover an off-road car
race for Sports Illustrated, he hallucinates swirls in the carpet patterns,
sees lizard heads sprouting from gamblers' necks and imagines the desk
clerk morphing into an eel.

Later scenes, which blur in hindsight, have a zonked Del Toro flailing
fully clothed in a filthy bathtub, puking in a toilet and mumbling
incoherently. The men go tripping at a circus-theme casino; attend a
district attorneys' anti-drug confab; stumble through a series of
pink-on-pink, tacky-surreal Vegas tableaux with piped-in Perry Como and
Debbie Reynolds; and meet a teenage innocent (Christina Ricci) who paints
kitschy Barbra Streisand portraits.

Depp spent months following Thompson around so he could play the fabled
journalist -- and the results show in his detailed mimicry and
crazed-savant delivery. But underneath all his buggy gestures and tics, he
doesn't show us a personality; he gives us a burlesque, not a performance.

If ``Fear and Loathing'' had any sense of moving toward something or being
about something, Depp might have fared better. But it's really a series of
sketches on one theme. Even with Gilliam's cheeky visual flights -- a
series of Richard Nixon heads spinning through a hotel room, for example --
it's dated and surprisingly slight.

)1998 San Francisco Chronicle

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)