Drugs are bad.

That’s the main point of Richard Linklater’s surreal animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi paranoia novel “A Scanner Darkly.” While I certainly can’t begrudge any movie for beating that old – but as valid as ever – adage over the head, I also can’t help but think there should be more peaking out from under the covers of this uncomforting mind-tripping melodrama. Certainly the film is unique, a one of a kind visual wonder full of disturbing images and quirky out of left field humor. But it’s also sluggish and simplistic; the final endgame holding it together about as shocking as stepping on a nail and finding out it hurts.

Still, this is the kind of movie where it is virtually impossible to take your eyes off of it once it starts. Linklater weaves a macabre web that’s nearly impossible to forget, the picture sprinkled with outlandish moments and images sure to become ingrained upon a person’s psyche no matter how hard they try to discard them. Scenes of individuals covered in Machiavellian hordes of marauding lice and of people turning into giant Kafkaesque cockroaches are certainly unforgettable, while a moment near the end of disassociated monotony sprinkled with unknowing recognition brought tears to my eyes.

I also loved the so-called ‘Scatter Suit’ used to hide a person’s identity. A twisted amalgam of differing peoples that’s truly sensational, this outfit gives the movie a freakish groove that can’t help but be unsettling. It’s a horrifying invention of practical impracticality, a good idea unfortunately causing the wearer to lose contact with their own person leaving walking human ghosts detached from their own identity.

The film is a loopy dreamscape of imagery and science fiction set in a world where Big Brother isn’t so much a feared future monstrosity as it is a way of life people have just grown accustomed to. A cog in that omnipresent surveillance machine is an undercover drug enforcement officer known only as Fred (Keanu Reeves). He’s infiltrated a group of friends living out of a rundown Orange County, CA home in order to find out which one of them is connected to a big time drug runner who has been pushing a malicious pill known as Substance D all across the United States.

The remainder of the movie is all about watching this group; Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane), James Barris (an absolutely brilliant Robert Downey Jr.), Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), Donna Hawthorne (a miscast Winona Ryder) and Robert Arctor (also Reeves); sitting around the latter’s house and getting high. Sure there are other things going on and other places the picture goes, but overall this is its primary set and the main place where all its action takes place.

Some of this is interesting (loved a dialogue between the four guys set in a speeding tow truck). Some of it isn’t (a discussion between Ryder and a mysterious gentleman is pretty much worthless). In the end, for all the surveillance, paranoia and shifting identities, the whole movie boils down to how bad drugs are and the shattering influence they have on a person’s psyche. A worthwhile point to make, to be sure, but one I’ve already seen in better pictures than this one.

I almost feel bad thinking this way about the piece. If anything, this is easily the most authentic adaptation of a Dick novel ever (including Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking “Blade Runner”). Better, the film is a visual marvel, Linklater’s second attempt at rotoscoping (a procedure where animation is drawn over the forms of real actors after photography has finished the director first used in the fantastic “Waking Life”) an exquisite use of the art form. I also liked the majority of the performances, Reeves in particular striking me with his sad, almost invisible portrayal of a man losing contact with the very bits and pieces which make him who he is.

And yet, even with a final scene as disturbing and bone chilling as any I’m ever likely to see, “A Scanner Darkly” left me cold and more than a little bit bored. While the effort bringing this to the screen is certainly commendable, the resulting picture is an unfortunate enigma, a didactic storyboard of unfortunate moralizations we’ve already seen many times before.