Johnny Mnemonic (1996)

"Ahead of its Time"

The science fiction  film nobody liked very much when it came out (the critics gave it a roasting and its director - Robert Longo - never made another feature) is getting a special 21st anniversary digital re-release from Vertigo. But is it as bad as all those 1990s critics claimed?

Actually, no it isn't. Not at all.

Had it been released five years later, post THE MATRIX (1999), it's likely audiences would have gone for this film in a big(ger) way than they did, having been familiarised with some of what we get here. William Gibson's ground-breaking cyber-punk novel Neuromancer was published in 1984 but the concepts it introduced were still foreign to most 1990s cinemagoers. Unfortunately Gibson's screenplay for JOHNNY MNEMONIC throws a lot of these concepts at the viewer right away and expects them to keep up. 

There's a lengthy 'explanatory' crawl at the beginning that makes you think the film is going to be more complex than it actually is. Essentially Keanu Reeves, in a role that now seems tailor made for Nicolas Cage, is Johnny, a data smuggler who has had a part of his brain replaced by a hard drive. Doing a job for his agent (the always watchable Udo Kier) Johnny gets too big an upload and has a limited time to deliver it before it destroys his brain. This MacGuffin of information drives the plot, causing him to be pursued by various factions, all of whom want it for their own purposes, as he meets a variety of colourful characters along the way.

And that's it. But add in Dolph Lundgren as an implant-enhanced preacher-cum-assassin and a climactic fight against the backdrop of a tank containing a dolphin that's been hardwired into the internet and you can understand why non-cyberpunk-savvy reviewers of the time threw their hands up and their pens down (after awarding the film a one star rating). Now, in the aftermath of the work of the Wachowskis, Michel Gondry, Christopher Nolan and most recently Brandon Cronenberg, JOHNNY MNEMONIC is a lot more approachable. 

It's by no means perfect, however. On the whole there's little attention paid to the acting (apart from Udo who is, as always, a treat) and the film might have worked a lot better with many of the roles being played by skilled B movie actors of the period like Mary Woronov, Jeffrey Combs and Tim Thomerson, who could have saved scenes when the plotting got rough. Overall, though, it's a film ripe for rediscovery and if, like me, you gave it a miss back in the day because of those awful reviews, you'll find yourself quite pleasantly surprised.

JOHNNY MNEMONIC is getting an HD digital release on Monday 10th May 2021