Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels like a six-hour epic crammed into two hours. The film is so rich with striking minor characters and clever, brief scenes that the longer you reflect on it, the more tidbits you pull out of your memory. Where with most commercial films you might recall a handful of memorable moments, Fear and Loathing offers a cornucopia of such fragments. The density of the film is perhaps its greatest strength.

Fear and Loathing is an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's infamous novel by the same name. Briefly, it's the story of a drug-crazed journalist and his drug-crazed lawyer/buddy as they hit Las Vegas in the early 1970s as journalists covering first a motorcycle race, then a cop convention. The focus of the story is on the bizarre misadventures of the pair and their resulting observations (direct and indirect) on American culture of the period.

Director Terry Gilliam has crafted a fat bastard of a film. So much happens, in such a disjointed, mixed-up fashion, that it's hard to believe you've only watched one movie. The film does, I believe, fail to draw you in during its opening scenes, possibly because of the distancing narration and the disjointedness of the narrative, but by the time the characters reach Las Vegas you're on their side and have adopted their warped perspective on events.

Once things get rolling, the film is laugh-out-loud funny, at least if you've got a suitably jaded and bleak sense of humor. Depp and del Toro are quite effective as the lead characters, gracing the film with a cranked-up weirdness that rarely fails to be entertaining. Numerous cameos add spice, although none last long enough to make much of an impression--hey, that's why they call them cameos--except for Ellen Barkin, who plays a run-down waitress with such a palpable sense of failure and fear that the scene plays out with few laughs and a lot of discomfort. That's okay, because this isn't meant to be a feel-good movie, but it's still a bit distant in tone from the rest of the film and yet doesn't seem to occupy a particuarly important part of the story--that is, the discordance doesn't seem to be dramatically necessary, given that the rest of the film is a bit wackier in its execution.

Gilliam is a brilliant director, with a string of distinctive, inventive films under his belt. The subject matter of Fear and Loathing is a bit off the beaten path for him, given its fixation on recent/contemporary America rather than his usual fantastical analogues for same, but he executes like a pro and pulls together a tight little film on a tight little budget. All of the actors pull off their roles with style, though it helps that they're all drawn larger than life. Depp and del Toro deserve special mention for going beyond the call of duty in what clearly seems to have been a labor of love for them both. Depp has been terrific in films like Ed Wood, Dead Man, and Donnie Brasco, and it's a pleasure to see him in yet another completely different role here. Del Toro has done good work before, and here--with fifty pounds gained for the role--he really throws himself into the part with appropriate gusto.

Fear and Loathing doesn't really have a lot to say about its nominal topic--American culture in the early 1970s--since it's busy focusing on the distasteful hijinks of its two main characters. Thompson's book took a broader view and had more of a commentary aspect to it, but Gilliam has understandably had to focus on the actions of the main characters instead. He makes room for a couple of Thompson's discourses on America, but the vast majority of the film is devoted to wild behavior. As a result, the film is much more a portrait of two crazy friends than it is the portrait of a nation or a time and place; these guys seem so out of their element that they wouldn't be any different in the 1970s or the 1990s. Those looking for insightful social commentary should look to the book instead of the movie, but the movie still does an excellent job of taking a cockeyed look at life and at two of the more colorful examples of what life should--or should not?--be.