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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Johnny Mnemonic is colorless
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2024 04:54:53 -0000 (UTC)
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Out of the 50 or so major roles Keanu Reeves has had since Ted in Bill &
Ted's Excellent Adventure, this is Reeves', uh, 49th best movie. We can
debate which movie is worse.

He's utterly wooden, a deliberate acting choice, in a suspense/thriller
that lacks suspense. The only vaguely suspenseful scene is downloading
the massive data dump -- 160 Gigs! -- into is brain implant. We see the
Yakuza hit men in the elevator. The data dump is saved... but the fax to
Newark never goes through? Von Flores (Sandoval on Earth: Final
Conflict, who gave a consistently good performance on one of tv's worst
series) is in this scene.

Directed by Robert Longo. As far as I know, this was his only major
motion picture. Adapted from a William Gibson 1981 short story. Gibson
was unhappy with the adaptation and its major changes, and Longo was
unhappy with the editing and certain changes forced on him by the
studio. Takeshi as the Yakuza hit man gets additional minutes of screen
time in the Japanese version, but there is no version of this movie that
expresses the director's intent.

Is there a good movie to be assembled from available footage? Highly
doubtful in the extreme.

The director was denied the ability to shoot in black & white. So, in
2021, he converted the movie to B&W from a Blu-ray, and later, got
official permission from the studio. This led to screenings and a home
video version in 2022.

Since the effects looked truly awful in 1995, they look better in b&w.
The set piece finale -- Johnny hacking his own brain -- was entirely a
bad video animated sequence. Was it shortened? Not sure. It still looked
bad but the color never did anything for it.

Dina Meyers -- young, adorable -- has a major supporting role. Dolph
Lundgren took yet another stupid role in a lousy movie that did nothing
to make him into a major action star.

Everybody wants a piece of Johnny: his head.

The movie ends with a standard disclaimer that it's fictional. Set in
2021, during a major world-wide plague. A multinational pharmaceutical
corporation is the enemy, having discovered a cure for the plague, but
it's sitting on it for treating the plague's symptoms as a chronic
condiction is far more profitable.

None of that could possibly be true, right?

Montreal and Toronto and Mississauga stand in for Beijing and Newark.

If you hated this the first time, uh, it's the same movie, just b&w. The
picture is less displeasing. That's the best I can say.