Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with two more test screening reviews for the upcoming Richard Linklater doing Philip K. Dick flick A SCANNER DARKLY. The first up is spoiler free, the second is loaded with spoilers. The only problem is the second one is a full review and the first one took a page from Matt Stone and Trey Parker's SOUTH PARK commentaries. I'd call it review-mini. So, first up is the spoiler-lite version. See you below for the big one.

We were first ANYWHERE to see it today in SM @ Laemmle 4 Plex. RDJr. and Winona do some fine acting. However the narrative slogs along. Lots of talking head expository stuff. Sometimes the flourishing animated details seem to slow things down. But the viewer is always getting a taste of the characters' tweaky POV. Linklater gave the actors room and the comedy scenes rock. WoodyH has a blast and he is funny. But it's Downey's movie. Keanu's a dud. He doesn't transcend the two-dimensional toon format, playing second fiddle to his "scramble suit".

And back. Okay, for those brave enough, here's the more indepth review. The review comes off as mixed-positive. I think we're going to be getting a rather widely split audience on this one. The subject matter is dense, questions are left unanswered... It's gonna be a movie that pisses some people off and make some other people gleefully happy. I'm dying to find out which side of the fence I fall...

A Scanner Darkly Review

(Caution: This review will contain plot spoilers)

Tonight my wife and I saw a preview of “A Scanner Darkly” in Santa Monica. After waiting outside in line for about an hour (we showed up exactly when we were supposed to, but there was already a line all the way down the block, and they kept letting 18-22 year olds, who better fit the demographic for some focus group they were going to do, go ahead of us), we were escorted inside to a pair of seats in the very front row of this rather ratty little theater. As for the probably thirty people in line behind us? Well, I guess they waited an hour just to be sent home. So if my review seems overly negative in parts, it might just be because we were treated so awfully by whatever market research group was doing the screening.

Anyway, the film started right away, with no previews or anything. The guy introducing it said it was a work print that might have some unfinished scenes, but everything looked finished to me. I haven’t read the Phillip K. Dick novel this is based on, so I’m not sure how closely the plot follows that; I’ll just describe the movie I saw. The setting, if I recall correctly, is 8 years in the future in Anaheim California. We are told that twenty percent of the population has become addicted to drugs, including a new super-addictive, super-dangerous drug called ‘D.’ There is a network of undercover spies trying to trace the source of this drug, all of whom wear special camouflage cloaks that constantly cycle through different appearances, so the spies/cops don’t even know the identities of each other. Why? I guess it has something to do with the scanners – but are the scanners part of the same government, or another player? If this was made clear in the movie, it passed me by. Honestly, the morphing disguises seemed to be designed more to allow a Shocking Surprise at the end of the movie than to actually make sense within the context of their world.

Of course, what’s most notable about this movie is that it is filmed in that same cartoon-painted-over-real-life process that we saw in “Waking Life,” and for the most part, it was pretty well done. This effect allowed the movie to look a lot like a moving comic book – the characters had a lot more detail and texture than traditional animation, while still looking like animation rather than live action. Sometimes in scenes where the camera moves a lot, this effect can be a little awkward – things on different planes don’t seem to move quite right – but it allows effect like the above-mentioned camouflage suits to work a lot better than they would in a traditional live-action movie.

A surprising amount of this movie exists on the level of stoner comedy. Because so much of the population is on drugs, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior get to spend their screen time acting silly and stoned, which isn’t really that much of a stretch, so they pull it off pretty well. Keanu shifts between hanging out with them and hanging stoned to his undercover job as a cop who used to have a normal family life until… he banged his head on a cabinet? Unless there are forces at work I don’t understand, that is about all it took for him to withdraw from life and work as a cop to try to infiltrate this stoner circle, all the while getting more and more addicted to the drug himself. Keanu is more or less playing Harrison Ford in Blade Runner or Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but, well, Keanu is no Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise. He’s just as serviceable here as he was in The Matrix or Constantine, so there you go.

So, again, spoilers for the end of the movie: it turns out that Keanu’s boss at the spy agency is… Winona Ryder, his stoner-girl buddy who was almost his girlfriend, but wouldn’t let him touch her, but pretended to be a prostitute so they could have sex, I guess! And the whole time she was setting him up so he would get so burnt out on this ‘D’ that he would have to go to the detox center/work farm where… it turns out they’re actually manufacturing the drug! So now Keanu is on the inside, but possibly too brain damaged to ever recover, and Winona Ryder is feeling guilty, and doesn’t know if she can go on with her police work? So, what happens next?

Well, that’s the end of the movie. As the lights came up and a few people started clapping, I found myself feeling like I had just seen 2/3 of a pretty decent movie, but they had forgotten to show the last reel. The movie ends with a lot more questions unanswered than answered: Who exactly are the scanners? Are they just part of the police, who are filming everything all the time, or what? Why is the detox place growing the drug? Is it to make money, control the world, pacify the masses, get more detox business? Why does Keanu take a sample of the flower at the end? What purpose does Winona Ryder think it will serve to send him there, if he’s so brain-dead he won’t be able to spy, and doesn’t even know he’s supposed to? Does it work? Maybe in the novel, things feel more settled at the end, or at least the lack of loose-end-tying-up feels satisfying, but my wife and I left the theater feeling cheated out of a complete movie (and with neck cramps from staring up from the first row).

So in summary: the movie works pretty well visually (although there are no big explosions or car chases or anything like that; it’s not that kind of movie), and is fairly watchable most of the way through, if only for Robert Downey Junior’s over the top paranoid stoner. However, I didn’t feel like the movie told me a complete story; if this had been the 90 minute (it was a short flick) premiere of the “Scanner Darkly” TV series, I would probably tune in next week to see what was going to happen. As it is, I didn’t think the story was complete enough to be compelling sci-fi, or action packed enough to be mindless popcorn fun. But what do I know? I’m not 18-22.

Call me Mraig