The Robert Downey Jr. renaissance of the mid-00s continued as he worked under a range of young and talented directors to older, more established ones. In A Scanner Darkly, it was the underrated genius of Richard Linklater that tapped into Downey’s skills and perhaps some of his personal history. He plays a guy named James who is one of the drug addicts living with the Keanu Reeves protagonist character.
This is one of Linklater’s rotoscoped animation movies, so the entire thing was shot on camera and then converted to a graphic format, like he did previously in Waking Life. This can seem to gloss over a performance’s imperfections perhaps, but it can also make what we subconsciously may expect to be uninteresting animation come to life when you have someone with the energy of Robert Downey Jr. on the screen. His performance here is a perfect fit for the labyrinthine Philip K. Dick adaptation, with as much madness as believability and as much humor as despair.
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