DUDE, `SCANNER' IS JUST SO WASTED.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Nothing like a Philip K. Dick cartoon to remind you why you decided to stop taking psychoactive drugs and do something interesting with your life.

Yes, Dick, the science fiction writer whose works have led to such genuinely mind-bending movies as ``Blade Runner'' and ``Minority Report,'' was quite the hophead. Sometimes, this resulted in brilliant books about alternate realities (I'd recommend ``The Man in the High Castle'' as the best thought-ought) or paranoid delusion (``Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'').

And in the case of ``A Scanner Darkly,'' it led to one of the most realistic portrayals of wasted days and the hallucinatory/fascist consequences of overindulgence ever printed. And that in a dystopian tale about Orange County narcs who wear computerized ``scramble suits'' that can change every aspect of their appearance several times a second.

It's a good book. But even with the scramble suit visual, ``Scanner Darkly'' is not movie material. Aside from a few depictions of the pharmaceutical DTs -- one addict is hilariously convinced that nonexistent bugs are crawling all over him and, worse, his poor dog -- this is mainly a movie about people sitting around talking.

Stoners talking nonsense. Cops talking arcane and much too overthought shop. Over and over and over and over. For days, which takes up a good hour of more of screentime. Which feels like eons.

Director Richard Linklater at least came up with the most appropriate way possible of filming this mildly psychedelic nodfest. As he did with the earlier ``Waking Life,'' Linklater videoed his cast spacing out around his Austin, Texas, home base, then turned the digital footage over to computer animators. They basically traced over it all on Macs -- it's the modern equivalent of rotoscope animating -- adding, of course, the scramble suit permutations and making the edges of everything kind of quiver for that trippy effect.

It looks fantastic. Just not fantastic enough to hold our interest.

Keanu Reeves is the deep-cover narc Bob Arctor. Purely in the line of duty, Bob's gotten a little too into his role as an abuser of the powerful Substance D. He shares a crash pad with motormouthed conspiracy/speed-freak Jim Barris (a perfectly cast Robert Downey Jr.), dopey Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson; again, perfect) and the dealer his heart longs for, Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder; we shall not be the ones to judge).

They've become his buddies. But he's got to turn them in so they can get sent to some corporate rehabilitation gulag that is steadily taking over the world or something. Trouble is, Arctor is so blitzed, he may be the one his cop colleagues really want to nail the most. Like they say, it's not paranoia if ...

While most of the movie's drab, lower suburbia backgrounds look pretty two-dimensional, the convincing detail on the animated actors is just astounding. It sounds like a joke to say that Reeves has rarely given a more compellingly expressed, deeply wounded performance, but in all seriousness, that's what we see here. Downey and Ryder also register some of their best work, and there's not a single supporting character that fails to come off as thoroughly human.

An impressive work of art, ``A Scanner Darkly,'' but you might need drugs to sit through it.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

A SCANNER DARKLY - Two and one half stars

(R: drug use, language, violence, sex, nudity)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane.

Director: Richard Linklater.

Running time: 1 hr. 40 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Pacific's The Grove, Farmers Market; AMC Century City; Laemmle Monica, Santa Monica; Edwards University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: That woozy digital rotoscoping technique Linklater used for ``Waking Life'' is perfectly suited for this Philip K. Dick story about stoners and narcs going paranoically batty in near-future Orange County. But it doesn't make a lot of boring druggie babble any more interesting to sit through.

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Keanu Reeves is an illustrated man in ``A Scanner Darkly,'' based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick.