Animated sci-fi drama about an undercover narcotics cop whose own addiction is planned by his sup... A scene from 'A Scanne

Animated sci-fi drama about an undercover narcotics cop whose own addiction is planned by his superiors. With Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson. ­Directed by Richard Linklater (1:40). R: Drug content, language, violence, sexuality. Loews Lincoln Square, Landmark Sunshine.

Fans of the late sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick may rejoice at the news that Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly" is the most faithful adaptation of one of his stories to reach the screen. Unfortunately, the story is one of Dick's least cinematic.

"Scanner Darkly," a murky, dialogue-heavy tale of intrigue in an allegorical future where the war on drugs has been all but lost, was done with the same rotoscoping process Linklater used for his 2001 philosophical thumbsucker, "A Waking Life."

The cast performed their parts before digital cameras, then computer animators painted over the images, creating a look that is both real andsurreal at the same time. The actors - Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, among them - are instantly recognizable, but they move like animated figures from a graphic novel.

Linklater used the process to get viewers closer to the mind-set of the drug-addled characters, and the dreamy landscape does have a narcotizing effect. But that's not all good. It's hard to concentrate when you're stoned.

Written in the late 1970s as a commentary on the paranoia of the drug culture, "Scanner" focuses on a group of quasi-friends addicted to Substance D, a fictional composite of every mind-altering temptation on the black market.

One of the men, drug dealer Bob Arctor (Reeves), is actually an undercover narc named Fred, who has been assigned to spy on himself in the rundown Southern California tract house he shares with two other men. One of them, Downey's James Barris, is a would-be snitch who goes to the police and ends up ratting Bob out to, well, Bob.

Barris doesn't know that Bob is Fred because in his official capacity, Fred wears a "scrambler" suit, a fast-forwarding gallery of faces that hide his identity.

As fascinating as that suit is to look at, "Scanner" is mostly all talk, and the talk is entertaining only when it's coming from Downey. The actor's long history of drug abuse taught him a thing or two about cooked behavior, and he gives some anxious run-on monologues that are very funny.

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