A Scanner Darkly film review

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A SCANNER DARKLY

Richard Linklater has always been one of America's most versatile directors, jumping from project to project with a zeal akin to our own Michael Winterbottom. Arguably most famous for his Before Sunrise and Sunset offerings, in the last few years alone he has given us the offbeat Tape, the commercially successful School of Rock, Billy Bob Thornton's Bad New Bears as well as 2001's Waking Life, the film which his latest offering most resembles. Some people may find A Scanner Darkly off-putting because of the technique employed - called rotoscoping, it basically transforms what the camera films into a dreamy cartoon effect- but there should be enough fans of writer Philip K Dick (not to mention the film's stars) to ensure it has a successful enough outing on the big screen.

Anyone familiar with the dystopian futureworld that runs through Dick's work should know what to expect. In previous adaptations of his books and stories such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report this world has been run by faceless, technologically-advanced pseudo-governments which place the collective commercial good well above the fate of the individual.

Things are no different in A Scanner Darkly - which, once you actually get used to the style employed turns out to be an often amusing affair - where Keanu Reeves plays a kind of post-Matrix Neo character by the name of Bob Arctor. Bob is employed by higher forces as a narcotics spy (and given a suitably futuristic face-changing hood which allows him to slip in an out of various identities), to seek out the trafficking of the latest lethal drug on the market.

Bob's problem, however, is that the suspected cell of drug dealers he is assigned to spy on consists of his own housemates and girlfriend. In varied degrees of excess, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr and Winona Ryder play the three frazzled suspects with a euphoria and sense of mayhem that matches the wacky tone of the film. Things become inevitably more complicated as paranoid suspicions increase and everyone suspects everyone else of being a double agent.