Eh... I wasn't a fan. Somehow I had never seen it throughout all these years. It's certainly not an accessible movie, but neither is Apocalypse Now or The Big Lebowski, both of which Fear and Loathing sported copious shades of. And yet it didn't really work, at least for me. It's a textbook case where the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole; I found Johnny Depp totally engrossing and uproarious, the script (mostly) devilishly funny, and the set pieces and soundtrack to be very good. But in the end, it's really a stoner's movie. With Dazed and Confused and Pineapple Express you don't need to be on mescaline to enjoy it. With Fear and Loathing, I sorta think that's a prereq. Certainly, many of the brilliant lines can be appreciated in a sober state--"I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo"; "The dope fiend refers to the reefer butt as a 'roach' because it resembles a cockroach"; and "She's doing her master's thesis on well, um, Barbra Streisand" were my favorites--but the entirety of the film doesn't truly pull together and form something cohesive. And obviously it's Hunter S. Fucking Thompson, so perhaps "cohesive" is the antithesis of things in this case. But still, it's a two-hour flick, not a Grateful Dead jam session, and I don't think it worked wonders.
