Click to watch

Trailer for "A Scanner, Darkly"

To describe A Scanner Darkly as a futuristic film about drug use that mixes live action and animation will immediately give the wrong idea to anyone who cut their teeth on “head” films of the early 1970s. This is not a cinematic trip, a la 2001 or Fantasia or whatever other movies you used to see while under the influence. Adapting Philip K. Dick’s early 1970s novel about an Orange County undercover cop (Keanu Reeves) who is also one of the drug addicts he is assigned to infiltrate, director Richard Linklater uses the same rotoscoping process he employed in Waking Life, in which conventionally photographed images are treated to become animation. But where Waking Life varied the degree of animation in step with its shifting menu of ideas and discussions, it’s more or less omnipresent here, and much more static. Watching it gives the effect of a brief initial high followed by a bad buzz, which is not inappropriate to Dick’s story of loss of identity, surveillance and paranoia in an America that more resembles the one we live in than the one in which he wrote. Dick fans will be pleased that Linklater’s adaptation is far truer to its source than any previous film based on the late writer’s work. Others may enjoy the stoned repartee between Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson as Reeves’ roommates but otherwise find this heavy going.