Movie Review: A Scanner Darkly
Stars (Out of Ten): 2
One Word Summary: Crap

        'A Scanner Darkly” follows Bob/Fred, a drug dealer/undercover cop working on both sides of the war on drugs. Substance D has taken over the city streets, and as the police attempt to track the drug to it's source, Fred is assigned to follow Bob, who the police think might be a key player.
An adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, 'A Scanner Darkly” is directed by Richard Linklater, who, as in 2001's 'Waking Life,” shoots the film with live actors and then uses a computer to paint over them. (The process is called rotoscoping and apparently takes 500 hours to complete a minute of film.) The movie is an hour and forty minutes, so that's a lot of work—wasted.
You've seen rotoscoping in those Charles Schwab commercials. It's cool looking, but just as in the ads, it adds nothing to the message. At first I thought the point was to give the audience the same sense of hallucination that the characters are feeling, but for that to be the case, the effect would have to come in and out throughout the movie—because the whole movie is filmed this way that doesn't work.
Linklater (who's directed, of all other movies, 'School of Rock” and 2005's 'Bad News Bears”) makes the effect his primary narrative tool seemingly because he can. It adds nothing to the storytelling except distraction, and the technology isn't advanced enough to produce a feature length movie anyway. Characters appear with too little detail.
The scanner suit Fred so often wears throughout the movie is an incredible effect, but when it's on screen, you can't help but stare at all the faces and costumes that appear within it: the dialogue is lost.
'Darkly” could have been a movie about loss of privacy (a touch button issue in our post-9/11 society) or about the dangers of drugs, but by the end it simply asks who is more evil, the police or the people they're trying to prosecute—a reasonable question, but only for a society that even moderately resembles our own.
The film's saving grace (a hyperbole for a movie so beyond saving) is Robert Downey Jr.. His performance isn't only great because 'Darkly” could have been his 'E! True Hollywood Story” a few years back, it's great because his goofball, drug-fixed character provide the only entertaining moments and comic relief.

       The Bottom Line is that there are two kinds of people who will enjoy 'A Scanner Darkly:” people who take themselves too seriously, and people who take the state of affairs within our country too seriously. Me? Before 'A Scanner Darkly” I'd never had to beg a movie to end.