Subject: RETROSPECTIVE: JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 3 Apr 1997 15:30:47 GMT

JOHNNY MNEMONIC
                       A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
                        Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Silly and inane adaptation of Gibson's short story, which is
nowhere in sight. Gibson's script only adds insult to injury.

JOHNNY MNEMONIC is an awesomely bad movie. I say "awesomely" because it's
one thing to fail, but another thing entirely to fail so completely that
even the chances for camp value are sabotaged.

Keanur Reeves (who is terrible) stars as Johnny, an "information courier"
who can carry dozens of gigabytes of data in his head. He is given "one
last job" (whenever you are in a movie and you hear those words, RUN),
which involves him shoving so much data into his cranium that it could be
lethal. One of the neater touches that the movie brings in is that the only
way he could make such an arrangement work was by ditching all of his
childhood memories, but it's only followed up on in a token fashion.

For his trouble, Johnny gets chased by the Yakuza, who seem to be the new
bad guys in all the high-tech thrillers. What's funny is that if you watch
gangster movies made *in* Japan, there are whole gobs of details about
genuine Yakuza behavior and ethics, but of course there's no room in this
movie for any of that. The Yakuza are simply used to point guns, wave
swords, flaunt tattoos, and grimace menacingly. (I could go on about how
gangsters and criminals of many other ethnicities have gotten thoughtful
examinations in the movies -- BOUND BY HONOR, SUGAR HILL and AMERICAN ME
come to mind -- when Asians remain perpetually stereotyped. But that's
another essay.)

Anyway, Johnny runs and eventually winds up in Newark. Why Newark? Maybe
because it was cheaper to fake a future Newark than a future New York,
that's why. There, he meets an assortment of odd characters (Ice-T, Dolph
Lundgren and Henry Rollins play a whole gallery of weirdos). The script
deals with them with all the depth of pieces of furniture. It turns out
(what else?) that the data in Johnny's head could save a lot of people, but
of course Johnny only wants it out of his head so it doesn't kill him.
Handled right, this could have been absorbing, but the script manages to
mangle any chance of real sympathy for Johnny at every opportunity. 

The details about the look and feel of the future are all phoned in from
other, better movies -- BLADE RUNNER and BRAZIL come to mind. Everything
looks run-down and scummy, everyone dresses like they're punk rockers, and
videophones are commonplace. Snore. The only really interesting flourish is
an extended depiction of the way the Internet might work in the future
(complete with VR goggles and feedback gloves), but I kept thinking that it
was more like what some relatively un-technical fellow would *think* it
would look and behave like. A hacker of Johnny's caliber would be blasting
away with one command-line function after another, instead of wasting all
this time twiddling with holograms, but of course that's not cinematic.
Whatever.

What went wrong with this movie? Gibson wrote his own screenplay, which I
guess is part of the problem: what works as a short story doesn't work in a
movie. His ear for dialogue is terrible and the plot doesn't advance, it
convulses. From the script on out, it was probably all downhill. Renting
the movie to make fun of it is sort of pointless; there's no fun in kicking
a wounded dog, is there?

One out of four gigabytes of stolen pharmaceutical data.
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[email-masked]                                       EFNet IRC: GinRei
http://serdar.home.ml.org                          another worldly device...
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