Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

Surviving the Game (1994)

Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies, Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).

Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.

Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.

Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.

Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.


As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.