A Scanner Darkly is a Profound and Engaging Look at the Drug Life

The film "A Scanner Darkly" works in many ways. It combines the basic junkie tale, as has been told countless times, with different takes on the characters who live through the pain of addiction and life.

The cast, the animation and the original story by Philip K. Dick all combine to make this one of the most original mainstream films created in the 21^st century.The list of people in "A Scanner Darkly" make the film a hit just by their names alone. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder all have great performances in the film.

The animation is not like a cartoon. "A Scanner Darkly" was filmed like a regular movie, and then every scene was colored by a team of animators to make it a hybrid animated/live action film. The director, Richard Linklater, used the same animation style in his previous film, "Waking Life." Linklater combines the original off-beat story with a style that is similar to "Pulp Fiction" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

The science fiction element of Dick's original tale is also respected.

In the future, 20 percent of the population is addicted to drugs, and most of them to a red pill called Substance D. Reeves plays the main character, who is an undercover cop tracking down dealers while at the same time taking Substance D. Harrelson and Downey Jr. play his drug friends, while Ryder plays a girlfriend who doesn't like to be touched.

Harrelson really provides the comedy needed for this type of movie, saying the words in a junkie-way that really defines his character while making him amusing at the same time.

Reeves character is the most developed, as he struggles to go through normal life and hating every second of it. Reeves starts walking a tight line when he is assigned to investigate himself. This is possible because as an undercover operative, he uses a sort of cloaking technology which always shows different people's faces instead of his own. Not even his superiors know who he really is, as the constantly changing face and the fake name are emplaced so they won't know who each person is.

The movie holds together well, though it isn't better than "Blade Runner," the best movie adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick tale, it does defeat "Minority Report" in terms of originality and acting.

Drug life has been done to no end in Hollywood, but Dick wrote an original piece around the basic idea of drugs in the future. The acting and animation alone make this movie worth renting; add Phillip K. Dick's name and you can't lose.