JOHNNY MNEMONIC
A film review by Rob Furr
Copyright 1995 Rob Furr
I've paid my dues when it comes to cyberpunk in the visual media. I've seen all the episodes of MAX HEADROOM, I've seen both versions of BLADE RUNNER, I even still have an episode of WHIZ KIDS on videotape somewhere.
And now, I've seen JOHNNY MNEMONIC.
Of course, I could have skipped that last one and missed nothing. Every scene in this movie (save one, and I'll get to that in a bit,) gave me a galloping case of the "Been there, done that"s. Which is *incredibly* depressing, as the original short story was exactly that: original. "Johnny Mnemonic" and the other stories that were collected in William Gibson's BURNING CHROME, were original, well-constructed, painfully clear and brilliantly vivid short stories.
Gibson's talent has been slowly fading since NEUROMANCER, it seems. COUNT ZERO was good, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE was all right, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE was tolerable, VIRTUAL LIGHT was boring, and now he's got sole writing credit for this film, and it fits into that linear descent just fine, thank you very much. There are a few elements left in JOHNNY MNEMONIC from the original short story, but they're hidden behind an inordinately large load of, and I'm using this word intentionally, crap, and the good bits are the ones that Gibson chose to change. Instead of the film noir-esque aura of the short story, where there *are* no good guys, Gibson ladled gallon after gallon of Hollywood Motivation into the plot--he's no longer just a courier with information that matters nothing to him, he's now The Sole Hope Of The World. He's no longer just in danger of getting diced by a monofilament thumb, he's now got a Tragic Flaw, by jiminy, and He'll Die Because Of His Own Mistakes.
Sigh.
This is not to say that I'm writing a rotten review because of how different JOHNNY MNEMONIC is from "Johnny Mnemonic"; that's just why I'm disappointed. I'm giving JOHNNY MNEMONIC a rotten review because, unfortunately, it's a rotten movie.
It's stunningly unoriginal in production design; remember what I said about having seen MAX HEADROOM? Well, if you've seen any given episode of MAX HEADROOM, you've seen what the designers of JOHNNY MNEMONIC were trying to do, and you've seen it done twenty times better than JOHNNY MNEMONIC did it, on an incredibly smaller budget.
It features some stunningly bad acting: Keanu Reeves is rotten ... totally, unreservedly, completely rotten. It's not his fault--the script is the primary culprit--but, as bad as his portrayal is, he gives the best performance of the cast. Ice-T *could* have given a decent performance--he's a better actor than Keanu is, in my humble opinion - but he's got about six lines and about four seconds of screen time, which makes it kind of hard to tell whether or not it was a decent go at the role.
It's got some hideously bad special effects. Oh, *one* scene is well done, but the rest was on a level with the effects done for STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER.
It's got ... well, why go on? Bad acting, a bad script, unoriginal and badly executed design ... this movie is a turkey.
Almost.
One scene--*one* single, solitary scene is impressive, and it's almost enough for me to forgive most of the rest of the movie. Fortunately, the people who assembled the trailer also saw a good scene when they saw it, so most of it was included. The "What are you doing?" "Making a long-distance phone call." scene is probably the best virtual reality scene ever done on film or on TV. It's believable, well-done--Keanu performs well--and if I had my way, I'd pull that one single scene out of JOHNNY MNEMONIC and film an entirely different movie around it.
At any rate, I'm calling JOHNNY MNEMONIC a one-point-five star two-star movie. It didn't aim very high, and it missed what it was aiming at, but it had a redeeming feature or two. (On the Furr Scale, I rate movies by ambition and execution: rating EVIL DEAD II (a four-star one star movie, i.e., it didn't aim very high, but, boy, did it succeed) on the same scale as HEAVEN'S GATE (a one-star four star movie, i.e., it aimed very, very high, and failed utterly) is ludicrous. So I don't do it. A few examples; ROBOCOP is a three-star three star movie (aimed relatively high, did what it wanted to do,) THE RIGHT STUFF is a three-star four star movie (aimed very high, did pretty much what it wanted to do) and THE LAWNMOWER MAN was a two-star two star movie (didn't aim too high, and did what it was supposed to do, but not very well.))
-- Rob Furr's HTMLized .SIG is at http://www.groucho.com/
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