From Amazon.com
You might be tempted to call it "Johnny Moronic" after you've seen this illogical and derivative adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk short story (available in his book
Burning Chrome), which is all the more depressing since Gibson himself wrote the screenplay. First you have to ask yourself why valuable top-secret electronic data would be stored in the "wet-wired" brain of a human courier (played by Keanu Reeves), who then transports the data from China to New Jersey as part of his last, most dangerous assignment. Surely there are better ways to transmit sensitive information, but since this is really just a conventional thriller with near-future design and spiffy special effects, Gibson and New York artist Robert Longo (making his directorial debut) are more interested in surface gloss and cyberpunk atmosphere. On that level the movie's fairly engaging, and Japanese film star Takeshi Kitano makes a pretty good villain, tracking Reeves down for the information in his data-packed brain. The movie also boasts an eclectic gallery of supporting players including rapper Ice-T, performance artist and rocker Henry Rollins, beefcake actor Dolph Lundgren, and transcontinental oddball Udo Kier. They can't stop this trip through virtual reality from being botched up, but sci-fi fans will certainly enjoy the echo of Gibson's fiction that remains on the screen.
--Jeff Shannon
Review
Keanu Reeves' road to The Matrix was paved with several subpar techno-thrillers, none so dire as this disappointing collaboration between visual artist Robert Longo and cyberpunk auteur William Gibson. Given that Gibson's fiction basically transformed Blade Runner imagery into razor-sharp prose, it seems like the transformation would work in reverse. But Gibson and Longo get it all wrong, littering their film with clumsy exposition and stale action scenes that are miles away from the taut precision of the original short story. Molly, the knife-fingered enigma with the built-in sunglasses who made Johnny Mnemonic and the novel Neuromancer so cool and compelling, is replaced by Jane, an all-too-conventional girlfriend character with a thin veneer of tough-girl bravado. Newcomer Dina Meyer fails to invest the part with much wit or style, but she's no worse than Reeves, who proves incapable of enlivening the stale lost-childhood clichs with which Gibson saddles his character. In fact, the actor's most inspired line reading ("I want room service! I want a club sandwich! I want the cold Mexican beer! I want a 10,000-dollar-a-night hooker!") was reportedly an ad lib, which doesn't say much for the screenplay. Throw in Dolph Lungren and Henry Rollins in a pair of pseudo-intellectual, testosterone-soaked supporting roles and you've got an action film whose supposed smarts and heart make it far more excruciating than any straightforward genre exercise. Then there are the visual effects, which reduce Gibson's vision of Internet-based virtual reality to something that looks like an old MTV promo. Only the presence of ice-cold Beat Takeshi Kitano, the amusingly creepy Udo Kier, and the blustery Ice-T (playing virtually the identical character he essayed in Tank Girl the same year) provide any measure of incidental viewing pleasure. In all other respects, this one's a total dud. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
DVD ~ Danny Cannon
DVD ~ Andrew Davis
DVD ~ Taylor Hackford
DVD ~ Andrew Niccol
