I wanted, of course, to maintain a professional perspective, so I went to the cinema in my usual state of unfuddled sobriety.

That was my first mistake.

This second attempt to commit to the screen the hallucinogenic prose of Hunter S Thompson requires, for full enjoyment, the sort of openness of mind that you have to cultivate - preferably for ten or 15 years.

Thompson is the American writer who made his name in the Sixties by throwing himself hedonistically into his stories and inventing the phrase "gonzo journalism" to describe what he was about. What he was really about, though, was spending his every waking moment under the influence of one or other mind-altering drug.

In 1980, Bill Murray portrayed him in a film called Where The Buffalo Roam. Lots of Thompson's admirers went to see it, but either didn't like it or couldn't remember going to the cinema, and so the film sank into oblivion.

This new feature has a higher profile altogether. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the film is named after Thompson's best-read book) features Johnny Depp as the author (using, as in the book, the alias Raoul Duke) and is directed by Terry Gilliam, whose previous work includes the fantasies Time Bandits and Brazil.

Characteristically, Gilliam is interested more in visualising Thompson's hallucinations (bats, giant lizards, and so on) than in exploring his mindset. As a result, we get very little insight into whatever it was - genius or self-destruction - that drove Thompson and turned his writings into treasures of American pop culture.

Instead, Depp shambles from one wrecked hotel room to another as he traverses Las Vegas in the company of his Samoan attorney (Benicio Del Toro, looking as if he's stumbled in from a Cheech and Chong movie) while supposedly covering a desert motorcycle race for a sports magazine.

It's left to Thompson's prose, read by Depp in voice-over, to put the drug-induced antics into some sort of literary context.

It's a stylish film, and watching the characters incoherently self-destruct is not without entertainment, but ultimately it's a hollow experience - and one wonders why the original director, Alex Cox (whose film Sid and Nancy offered a far deeper perspective on the dope generation) was replaced.

What's encouraging, however, is that the involvement of a latter-day icon such as Depp will do much to spearhead a revival of interest in Thompson's work - and that, unlike the films it has inspired, speaks for itself.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.