"Scanner" not as intense as the book

Like its protagonist, Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly" suffers from a schizoid identity crisis. It's faithful to Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel about the horrors of drug abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia, and it's also very much a Linklater film. Those two qualities, however, don't always connect.

The director of "Dazed and Confused" and "Before Sunrise" favors entertaining dialogue over the deeper implications of Dick's mind-rattling plot. The result has "cult status" written all over it, but by doing what he does best, Linklater has robbed Dick's novel of the intensity that made it a cautionary classic. It's loyal to Dick without being, to coin the fan phrase, truly "phildickian."

Instead we get "quirky" with a capital Q, with Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and "Dazed" alumnus Rory Cochrane playing light and loose with material that should bristle with anxiety. Their jittery performances are fun when they're not bordering on self-parody. And Linklater perfectly captures the autobiographical aspects of Dick's novel, right down to the slovenly digs that recall Dick's dark days as an amphetamine addict with a coterie of drug-addled acolytes.

In a near-future where the drug war is lost and everyone is "scanned" by holographic surveillance recorders, Bob Arctor (Reeves) shares a shabby pigsty with stoner buds Jim (Downey Jr.) and Ernie (Harrelson), while friends Donna (Ryder) and Freck (Cochrane) drop in for regular hits of Substance D, an addictive psychotropic that Donna deals on the side. Suffering from the drug's most prominent side effect — it causes the brain's hemispheres to compete independently — Arctor doesn't realize he's also Agent Fred, an undercover cop assigned to spy on Arctor's friends and ultimately himself in an effort to glean Donna's unknown source of Substance D.

Arctor's split-brained existence turns "A Scanner Darkly" into a Möbius strip of bizarre, sometimes amusing psychological dilemmas, but it ultimately lacks any cohesive impact.

Then there's the issue of interpolated rotoscoping, the expensive, time-consuming animation process applied over Linklater's conventional filming. What served as an aesthetic novelty in Linklater's "Waking Life" seems like a pointless distraction here, robbing performances of nuance and sacrificing substance for a shallow "wow" factor that adds nothing to an already tenuous experience.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net