Eye Candy #212 - "Johnny Mnemonic"

Johnny Mnemonic:  Many people blame the late re-editing of this film for doing all the damage, turning it into an incoherent, sloppy mess.  I think blaming it all on the editors does the disserivce of letting screenwriter and cast off the hook for stinking it up, too. In the near future, with corporations controlling the world, a “data courier” carrying the cure to a worldwide plague in his head is hunted by various interested parties that run the gamut of intentions, including the Yakuza.  Cut from the same cloth as its contemporaries “Freejack” and “Strange Days“, it’s nominally based on a short story by William Gibson with what we‘ve come to expect of the now standard genre tropes (dirty dystopian future, underground resistance, virtual reality, that sort of thing).  Keanu Reeves is in the titular role in what I like to think of as the dry run for the “The Matrix”, a scant few years later (the leap from what wasn‘t accomplished here in 1995 to “The Matrix“ in 1999 is remarkable).  Except here he’s still more Ted Theodore Logan than Neo (in films prior to “The Matrix”, he always had this goofy walk where his shoulders flop around; it’s here too).  We also get Ice-T, Henry Rollins, Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, and, surprisingly, Takeshi Kitano.  This is the only full length directorial effort from artist Robert Longo, who, blessedly, hasn’t been given the reins of another film since.  His directing anemic and manages to make a thiller that doesn’t thrill.  Some of the computer-generated special effects are good for the time (this was 1995, after all), but the director obviously (and desperately) wants this film to be the next “Blade Runner”.  It ain’t.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”