From NetFlix:

Eager to flee his humdrum life in 1950s New York, booze-loving journalist Paul (Johnny Depp) moves to Puerto Rico and begins writing for a local rag, but his life becomes unhinged when he falls for a gorgeous woman (Amber Heard) and clashes with her shifty fiancé (Aaron Eckhart). Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, this adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s early novel also stars Richard Jenkins as Paul’s editor.

Nice black and white good versus evil where the good guy wins is always easy to watch. Sorry, not this time! Pessimism is the dominant theme here as we watch Johnny Depp drink, try drugs, fall in love with a crook’s girl friend, and start to get involved with the crook’s shady dealings.

You get a sense of how beautiful Puerto Rico is and how vulnerable it is to exploitation by American businessmen whose anti-communist rants are just too outlandish to even begin to take seriously. In fact, the script is not uniformly good and in fact sometimes just too preachy. Moreover, the delivery of those not so wonderful lines by the actors is just plain wooden at times.

Giovanni Ribisi plays a somewhat unbalanced drug addled nutcase, although it is not clear what he adds to the film.

All in all the film for me was only OK, which seems to be the critics’ conclusions in the Wikipedia article.

Read the final screen lines for a historical reference.