Johnny Mnemonic

Music video directors turned feature film directors are almost never good.  Sometimes it works out like David Fincher and sometimes it doesn’t like Michael Bay.  More often than not you get a film that has a lot of flash but is essentially hollow just like a music video.  I don’t think it’s a given that if you can make a music video then you can absolutely make a feature film.  But the thing is that a lot them are successful.  I mentioned Michael Bay as one of these directors that didn’t work out.  What I meant by that is that I think Bay makes shitty indecipherable movies.  I like virtually nothing about them.  Actually I thought The Rock was kinda cool but that’s all I’m giving him.  And even then The Rock isn’t getting better with age.  I find myself having less and less patience with it as time goes on.  Also, Bay’s new films seem to be getting worse and worse so there’s this guilt by association thing going on here.  But I didn’t mean for this thing to be about Michael Bay.  The music video director turned feature film director that I’m getting to is Robert Longo and he wasn’t very successful at making the jump.

Longo did music videos for New Order and R.E.M. and has only directed one feature, Johnny Mnemonic.  This is one of those films that looks and feels like a DTV movie and not like something that was ever in theaters.  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Ghosts of Mars kind of feel like that too.  I dunno.  But anyway, it’s a movie that requires an understanding that this was 1995.  Filmmakers were still embarrassing themselves with technology on screen.  The Net is the perfect example of what I’m talking about.  Every techno problem and piece of equipment in that film was outdated a year after it was released.  Ok I’m exaggerating but not by much.  Remember at the end when Sandra Bullock needs to find a computer with internet access and the only place that had it was a computer expo?  Or that she’s using 3 ½ floppy disks?  None of it holds up.  How about Eraser?  Actually I like Eraser but the computer stuff is terrible.  Like, they’re using minidiscs.  Do you still have your collection of minidiscs?  I know I don’t because I didn’t buy the fucking things and neither did anybody else.  I mean, Swordfish.  And they’re still taking advantage of people not knowing jack shit about computers today.  But it’s not really in the same way because they know that people are with it way more nowadays.  But I still think The Net is the worst offender.  When your whole movie hinges on this technology not being outdated and looking silly later then you’re betting against the house.  I’m telling you man they were just making shit up as they went in that movie.  And they make a lot of shit up in Johnny Mnemonic too.

The movie is set in the far distant future of 2021 but don’t get too excited for that year ‘cause it looks like it’s gonna be pretty shitty.  It’s your typical rich-corporations-have-all-the-power-and-the-people-have-nothing future.  Johnny Mnemonic is played by Keanu Reeves (Speed, Point Break) and is a guy that can hold information in his head.  In other words he gave up part of his brain so he could have a hard drive installed.  His job is to carry illegal information from one point to another.  Only this time he’s overloaded his brain drive thing.  But this doesn’t really make sense because a hard drive only has so much space and these guys that hire Mnemonic want to give him way more than what he can hold.  I guess the extra info seeps into his brain or something but this is clearly taking advantage of the audience not understanding how computer storage works.  Whatever.  The information that these guys loaded Mnemonic with must be pretty important because bad guys start to chase after him.  But the thing is Johnny doesn’t know what he’s carrying in his head.  Only people that access his brain drive know what’s in it.  So he gets rescued by Jane played by Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers, Saw) and they hide out at her friend’s place.  The friend is played by Henry Rollins (some movies, mostly music shit) and he is bad in this movie.  Actually everyone is bad in this movie which means that I can only blame Longo for this.  There are strange pauses in the acting and there’ll be weird outbursts of emotion sometimes.  The only guys that I kinda liked in this were Dolph Lundgren (I Come in Peace, Showdown in Little Tokyo) as Street Preacher (he looks great and plays such a great character) and Takeshi Kitano from Zatoichi.  Oh and I guess that I should mention that Ice-T (Surviving the Game, Ricochet, New Jack City) is in this as well as.  He plays that one character that he does in all of his movies.

But there is something that is incredibly and inexplicably bizarre in this movie.  Do not keep reading if you’re actually going to see this movie and want to be surprised.  Ok, by far the strangest thing in this piece is who plays the head of the resistance that fights the corporations.  You think it’s Ice-T because he certainly acts like the leader but it’s not him.  So we go through the whole movie and Mnemonic is trying to get this stuff out of his head or it’ll explode.  He needs a password to get it out but only has one piece of it.  He realizes that the only way to get the rest of the password is to go to the head of the resistance because apparently this guy can help figure it out.  So we get to the good guy headquarters and Johnny asks “where’s the guy?”  Ice-T reveals to us that it’s a dolphin.  A fucking dolphin.  I’m not making this shit up.  It’s a dolphin in a tank with a headset on.  If I had something in my mouth when I initially saw this I would have spit it out uncontrollably.  I have no idea if they wanted people to take this shit seriously or not.  Is this movie going the Orca route and trying to say that ,not whales but, dolphins are really smarter than humans?  That they don’t talk because their brains function at a higher level?  I don’t know how Longo got everyone on board with this but there it is, an aquatic mammal that leads an entire resistance of people against evil corporations.

You want to know what’s really amazing about this movie is that actually all of these odd things add up to make a pretty interesting viewing experience.  I mean you got a dark and desolate environment, goofy costumes and make-up, bad mid 90’s computer graphics a la The Lawnmower Man (remember VR?  Man that shit was stupid), a goddamn dolphin, strange acting, an even stranger idea that people illegally transport information using hard drives implanted in their brains and viola…Johnny Mnemonic.  But you know what?  The title makes no sense.  A mnemonic device helps you remember something but Johnny doesn’t know what he’s carrying in his head.  The hard drive doesn’t help him remember.  In fact he makes it explicit in the beginning of the movie that he has no knowledge of what people load him with.  So he’s not remembering shit.  It’s almost the exact opposite of what the name implies.  So he should really be called Johnny Fuhgeddaboudit.