Where the Buffalo Roam
About a week ago I decided to check out the other movie that was made centered around the character of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
“Where the Buffalo Roam”(Torrent, Streaming)
I find it very hard to judge this movie as fairly as I could have if I had reviewed it before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I do think that I would still believe this is the inferior of the two, but having seen Fear and Loathing, this seems to be much, much worse. The way that Dr. Thompson is portrayed overall, just seems very silly, and very self serving. Also the film makers seemed to only focus on the crazy parts of his life and none of the actual serious political parts of the stories he wrote. The main problem is that they didn’t want to adapt a single story and make it with range, instead they chose to take the craziest aspects of a bunch of different stories he had written and wrap them all into one loose story to illustrate how crazy this man’s life suppossedly was. So in this respect the writing fails miserably. The other aspects of the writing are ok, they do take some dialouge directly from some of the books, but for the most part, it’s not too great. The acting is what I would call slightly above average, Bill Murray does an excellent job with his portrayal, especially the voice, but it is still hard for someone of my generation to lose myself in a performance of Bill Murray’s without thinking of things like Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, the man is now an icon, and it just detracts from what he’s trying to convey in a role that was made for a character actor. The guy who played Lazlo did allright, although I don’t have anything especially good to say about him. The rest of the cast was pretty much background noise for those two and as such they don’t try very hard.
This is an average movie, that comes from far more than average source material. It is ok, but should be so much better. I would really only reccommend it to people who are big Hunter S. Thompson fans.
(5 and 1/2 out of 10)
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