Slotted as a Memorial Day Weekend blockbuster up against Casper and Braveheart, Johnny Mnemonic was supposed to thrill audiences with a gritty cyberpunk story told in a gritty dystopian future. Within two weeks Mnemonic was already cut from over half its screens, and by the sixth week it was gone from theatres entirely. While not a total box-office failure, and not completely hated by critics, Johnny Mnemonic remains an embarrassing vestigial limb of classic 80's science fiction, nearly parodying its own genre.
Mixing together two William Gibson short stories, the producers brought Gibson himself in to write the screenplay, giving nerds everywhere wet dreams. Starring hot-item Keanu Reaves fresh off from Speed, the producers supported him with Dolph "He-Man" Lundgren as "The Preacher", barely-known Dina Meyer as Reaves' cyberpunk love interest Jane, and up-and-coming Ice-T as gangleader J-Bone. The story revolves around Reaves' character, Johnny, who is a "data courier" tasked with using his brain to smuggle 320GB of super duper important files from Beijing to the cosmopolitan metropolis of Newark. (FYI: that's in New Jersey.) Much to nobody's surprise, things get complicated, and Johnny quickly finds himself amongst a seedy underground of cyberpunk archetypes. In a pathetic attempt at a spectacular finale, the showdown has us on a collapsed suspension bridge watching Johnny, Jane, J-Bone, and a cybernetic dolphin battle the Yakuza over the cure for a digital epidemic. They win, of course, Johnny is a hero, gets the girl, and everyone goes home happy.
More than just the molestation of a potentially interesting idea with an idiotic plot contribute to this epic failure. No, this movie fails nearly across the board. The first five minutes of film foreshadow how spectacularly awful the remainder will be. The opening dialogue tries to offer one-liners but ends up halting and awkward, the acting is so stiff as to be unintentionally confusing, and the sets are so low budget it makes one wonder where the $26 million budget went. Even the usually more subtle aspects of cinema are painfully crappy. The editing, pacing, and photography are, quite simply, glaringly amateurish. That audiences didn’t demand their money back before the first scene ended is a miracle.
The beginning actually manages to be so completely and utterly disastrous that Johnny Mnemonic actually goes uphill from there. Either that, or the audience simply has become numb to the pain. The next few scenes introduce the audience to the special effects style of the movie. Keep in mind that in 1995, audiences were watching Tom Hanks fly to the moon in Apollo 13, Pierce Brosnan jump off of things in Goldeneye, and Kevin Costner turn into a fish in Waterworld. Theatres were full of big-effects movies like Jumanji, Batman Forever, Congo, Braveheart, and Species. So when they sat down for Johnny Mnemonic, a major studio film released on the first Summer Blockbuster weekend, they were probably expecting an effects standard slightly higher than the made-for-1980's-TV-movie standard they got.
So what on Earth went wrong? Was it that William Gibson – a cocky science fiction author best known for his vivid writing style – was well out of his depth writing a screenplay? Was it that the director Robert Longo’s entire Hollywood experience consisted of a directing a short, two music videos, and an episode of “Tales from the Crypt”? Was it that Keanu Reaves’ ego absorbed so much of the movie’s budget there was no money left for sets? Or is the sad truth that the stylized action painted in Gibson’s cyberpunk literature is just too unrealistic a vision to make any sense on the screen? After suffering through all 96 minutes of Johnny Mnemonic, I theorize that at some point, the production staff simply stopped caring about quality, and just wanted to get the movie finished, squeezing a giant half-assed turd of a movie onto the public. But that's just my guess; perhaps the world will never truly know what went wrong.
