Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Criterion 4K Review: Toxic By , the movie, plays very differently in 2024 than it did in 1998, and that’s to its benefit. Certainly, the idea of a major studio like Universal releasing a film by director with a cast of A-listers (even as a negative pick-up!) who made, essentially, an extended drug hallucination based on a Hunter S. Thompson book about indulging in debauchery while reporting on a race and a police convention, is almost as dated as the notion of a mid-budget movie of any stripe from a studio.
But its downbeat tone of an elegy for the ’60s was all wrong for audiences in the ’90s, with Bill Clinton in the White House embodying the fantasy of a rascally, womanizing former radical having fun with power against all the anti-sex prudes. Only two years before Fear and Loathing hit theaters, The People vs. Larry Flynt depicted the head of Hustler magazine as a player and a hero for, among other things, sleeping with every stripper in his employ.
The notion it’s systemic sexual harassment never occurs to that film, in which Woody Harrelson plays the pornographer as just a fun-loving guy, once again against all the anti-sex prudes. Reckless guys living as they pleased were celebrated in the culture then. Fear and Loathing initially fits, as it urges you to laugh both at and with Raoul Duke ( ) and Dr.
Gonzo ( ), the lightly fictionalized literary avatars of Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, getting all kinds of messed up and .