Note on Keanu Reeves

Just watched A Scanner Darkly, the Richard Linklater adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel. This movie is the final word on Keanu Reeves as an actor.

In the film, Reeves plays Bob Arctor, an undercover cop who sustains brain damage as a result of the drugs he takes. Unbelievably, Reeves plays the brain-damaged Arctor and the healthy Arctor identically. Reeves literally cannot tell the difference (or at least cannot act the difference) between characters with and without brain damage. If we note the fact that he plays Arctor the same way he plays Neo, John Constantine, Johnny Utah etc etc etc , then the transitive property of equality leads to the conclusion that Reeves plays brain-damaged characters as normal or the logically equivalent Reeves plays all character as brain-damaged.

This sounds like a cheap one-liner, and it is one line long; it might or might not be cheap, but it is literally true.