Johnny Mnemonic
(Review Based on Edited for Television Version)
(1995)
review by Big McLargehuge

When you find yourself mid-film and realize that out of Keanu Reeves, Henry Rollins, Ice-T, Takeshi Kitano, Udo Kier, Dina Meyer, and Dolph Lundgren, and the best performance in the film is by Dolph Lundgren, you are in the midst of a bad movie.

Johnny Mnemonic takes almost none of it’s inspiration from the
fantastic short story by William Gibson, and considering the screenplay is ALSO the product of William Gibson one has to wonder just what the hell went wrong.

What Gibson does is melange a whole mess of characters and ideas from his short and long fiction into one massive mess. It doesn’t help that directing the performances is Robert Longo, who cut his teeth on ONE EPISODE of Tales from the Crypt then, following this catastrophy, vanished from the film industry. Assuming he wasn’t hunted down and eaten by Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson, Robert Longo is probably pumping gas at some out-of-the-way fuel depot muttering to himself about his one stab at greatness that ended so badly.

Gibson has issues with Hollywood. Every film project he’s done to date stinks, of course Johnny Mnemonic, and Abel Ferarra’s godawful treatment of New Rose Hotel, the worst celebrity episode of The X-Files, and several failed starts on a Neuromancer film.

Special mention goes to New Rose Hotel though, that had the same effect on me as accidentally shooting novocain into my temple. Though, to be fair Ferarra handled the adaptation so I can’t really blame Gibson. The short story from which the screenplay emerged is actually really good. Abel Ferarra turns it into a talk fest that so monumentally boring I wished for a coronary thrombosis or cerebral hemmhorage to end my misery.

But back to Gibson... I’ve also read that he had something to do with either Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection, which would explain a whole lot about the crap-tastic afternoon of misery that those movies offered me (though on further review it seems that none other than Joss Whedon foisted the fourth Alien film upon us, and people wonder why the last two seasons of Buffy were worse than a Facts of Life episode marathon and reunion show...).

Johnny Mnemonic follows SOME of the plot from the short story, that is, man has something stored in his head, another man wants that something, a woman protects the first man from the second. Then, the screenplay literally piles on tons and tons of crap pinched from other stories. Gibson fans take note! Johnny Mnemonic pilfers characters and events from, Virtual Light, Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The end result of all this processing is a film virtually free of any
of Gibson’s trademark language, visual style, or storytelling economy. In fact, Johnny Mnemonic plays less like the seminal Cyberpunk film and much more like a shitty Albert Pyun Blade Runner knock-off starring Rutger Hauer, Sandhal Bergman, and Wings Hauser...

A greater sin than muddling what I think of as Gibson’s best short
story, is the elimination of his single most interesting character,
Molly Millions, from the whole story. Rather than try and do the razor nailed, mirror-shaded bodyguard, we get Jane, an extraction of the Jane character of the short story Burning Chrome.

Let’s talk about the story for a minute.

Johnny Smith works as a data mule for an information broker named
Ralphie (Ralphie Face as created in the J.M. short story). Johnny
uploads 320 Gigs of information into his brain, but the drive he’s
implanted has only 160 gigs or storage, so the information begins to
leak. Within a few minutes of screen time Johnny has only 24 hours to live. What Johnny needs to do is get the info out before the
information seep destroys his mind.

So far so good.

Chasing down the stolen information, and therefore Johnny, is a Yakuza gang under contracts with the Japanese corporation Pharmacom. It turns out that a mystery disease known as Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (or NAS, or “The Black Shakes”) that apparently springs from the overabundance of personal technology.

If you haven’t figured out that Johnny’s carrying the cure to this
disease by the time the plot point appears, you haven’t been paying
attention. From that moment on the entire film follows EVERY action movie convention every put to film. And, making matters worse, when Johnny and his NAS affected bodyguard cease their running for any length of time, Gibson offers us a blab fest of expository dialogue that takes what little momentum the film has generated and stops it cold.

The action culminates in the Lo-Tech neighborhood (an element in the story) but visually pilfered from Virtual Light, where the residents

eschew technology in favor of a tribal existence. Okay, fair enough,
but then why do they have all this technology in their posession? The short story allowed the residents of Lo-Tech to live above the society, actually in the rafters of the dome covering Chiba City, and indulge in plastic surgery and canine dental implants. The film allows the Lo-Tech society to operate like a high-tech society and indulge in er... face painting... Yeah, it sounds as bad as it is.

Rounding out the story are ancillary characters like Henry Rollins’
“Spider” a black market doctor treating NAS patients at a clinic, the
Pharmacom database who exists as a person in the net (stolen lock stock and barell from Mona Lisa Overdrive), Ice-T’s “J-Bone” the feral leader of Lo-Tech, and Dolph Lundgren’s “Street Preacher” (an assassin with a Jesus complex).

The film concludes at Lo-Tech where Johnny needs a dolphin formerly used by the military to break the code locking the information in his head.

The acting is sub-par, but then I can only assume saying the lines in
this script presented a unique challenge, i.e. not laughing their
assess off... The only character who even attempts to pump some life into the film is Dolph.

What the hell is up with that?

Robert Longo’s direction doesn’t lend itself to the material either.
Like Chris Columbus, Longo loved to stick the characters dead center in the screen for EVERY SINGLE SHOT so that the film can easilly translate to TV aspect ratio. The sets are sparse when they need to be and jammed with junk when they need to be, and since the whole film takes place at night, and in the rain (or following a recent rain), most of the detail is lost.

The special effects, when there are any, are okay. The gunfights are
terribly filmed and confusing, but the few fist-fight sequences aren’t
too bad.

Visually, it’s a crap shoot, overall it’s just crap.

Johnny Mnemonic has been out on DVD pretty much since the DVD industry started. I don’t own it. I saw Johnny Mnemonic during it’s brief theatrical run and believe me, that was one time too many.

However, with the incredible popularity of The Matrix and assorted
sequels, all of Keanu Reeves’ flicks are showing up on TV. I happened to watch Johnny Mnemonic on TNT so it was edited for content, compressed for time, and loaded with commercials for services and goods I have no intention of buying.