Review of Johnny Mnemonic (1995) by Stefan G — 24 Nov 2014

Johnny Mnemonic is an example of a film that could have been good, but failed because its ideas weren't exactly executed very well. One big problem is that the prologue gives the impression of a very dumb 90's movie (which itself is at least accurate, given the writing).

Afterwards, the story is characterized by a sequence of events that don't seem to fit anywhere because the story is actually quite hard to follow. In this regard, I say this because the writers don't seem to know how best to handle their ideas, so what we get is a mess of a movie that seems to be going nowhere no matter what context there actually is.

Keanu Reeves' performance in this film is actually not as bad as I've heard it is, but it could stand to be better. The characters don't seem to exhibit a lot of personality, almost as though the actors portraying them didn't have much enthusiasm.

The visuals aren't too bad, but the special effects seem quite shoddy even for the time it was made, and this is blatantly obvious in the scenes set in the film's version of cyberspace. The only thing that was really interesting was the cyborg dolphin near the end of the film, which I'll admit had put me in stitches.

Over than that, there's not really much to say about it. It was a failure in the 1990's, and nearly twenty years later, it seems to have aged terribly.