Subject: REVIEW: JOHNNY MNEMONIC

From: [email-masked] (Rob Furr)
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 20:44:13 GMT

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/