My guest at the screening of A Scanner Darkly humorously referred to the movie as, "Fear and Loathing in Anaheim." The comment was notable to me for two reasons. First, it is a funny description, brief and fairly accurate. Second, I wondered why I didn't think of it first. And I don't mean that as a comment on the speed of my wit -- it's really about why I didn't immediately connect the superficial similarities between this movie and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both drug trip movies. It may have to do with how I remember reacting to Fear and Loathing with the feeling that I watched something wildly and dangerously expressive, while I met A Scanner Darkly with something close to perplexed indifference.

This surprises me, since I think the movie has a lot of positive factors going for it. It's a science fiction piece based on a Philip K. Dick novel; it's directed by Richard Linklater, whose works that I've been exposed to have proven to be winners; and it's his second foray into the fascinating animation technique known as rotoscoping. Last used in Waking Life, it's the process of applying a layer of animation over sequences shot in live action, thus allowing for some wiggle room in terms of presenting reality. In this movie, it's employed to creative effect, from a sequence showing insects crawling all over a junkie, to the presentation of the "scramble suit," a disguise that continuously shifts the appearance of different parts of a body to resemble pieces of different people.

The decision to use the style for this movie is undoubtedly sound, as the story has everything to do with not being able to see the world clearly as the result of drug abuse. The main character (Keanu Reeves) possesses dual identities as a result of this drug -- an omnipresent terror known as Substance D -- which splits the two hemispheres of the brain such that they can no longer connect their separate perceptions. Thus, Reeves plays Fred, an undercover police agent who is assigned to spy on Bob Arctor, a member of a small drug-using commune. The tricky part is that Fred and Bob are the same person.

The rotoscoping here blurs the edge between reality and animation so strongly that, for much of the time, you may feel you're not really watching animation. Some of the photography seems barely modified (which speaks of the amazing job the animators did to achieve that feel). Some scenes are modified just enough so that objects play tricks with depth perception. The technique is used most obviously during a few fantasy sequences and when the scramble suits are used. The effect is unsettling, always giving a sensation of displacement. It's an excellent marriage of presentation and theme, but it's a discomforting one; also, for a technique that has such an expansive potential, its use here actually feels muted and restrained -- appropriate but not exciting.

The story, which takes place seven years in the future, is a condemnation of drug abuse as written by Dick, an experienced ex-user during his lifetime. As directed by Linklater, it's also something of a comedy with tragic undertones. There are a few miscalculations here -- much of the film's content is filled with comic aspects which come from co-stars Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson as Bob's fellow drug addicts, at their obnoxious worst while rambling and engaging in paranoid antics (they're much less entertaining when contrasted with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro's loopy insanity in Fear and Loathing). They are at odds with the movie's narrative construction; actually, most of the humorous moments in the movie appear misplaced, even indulgent, in tone and staging when set alongside the ever-darkening path of Fred/Bob, as he winds closer to losing himself completely. The characters' personalities and their neo-hippie babblings do possess more than a whiff of strong authenticity (it's more like the '70s than the near future), but the cumulative effect is one of being sober at a party while watching other people getting drunk.

And it's all of these elements wrapped together that create A Scanner Darkly experience, a blurry combination of reality and fantasy, comedy and tragedy, the future and the past, sobriety and intoxication. Such blurriness, though, tends to normalize any paths of ambition the piece may have had the potential for. I can't help admiring most works for abstaining from overt sensationalism, which this one easily could have employed; but I also think the movie underemployed its dramatic momentum, focusing a little too much on being unfocused. In other words, this is an ambitious drug movie that's much less mind-blowing than it could've been.

(Released by Warner Independent Pictures and rated "R" for sexual content, language and a brief violent image.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com .