Here's where I let it all hang out. Here's where I admit to loving a movie that is absolutely awful. But, dammit, I can't help it, I love Johnny Mnemonic.Just look at the cast, Starship Trooper's Dina Meyer, The Chase's Henry Rollins, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo's Ice-T, and Much Ado About Nothing's Keanu Reeves. An all star cast if ever there was one!
Need more proof of how great this movie is? Try this...Dolph Lundgren as a preacher/assassin. Yeah.
Not enough? Ok, look at this:
Do you know what that is? It's a drug addicted, navy trained dolphin. Named Jones. It's THAT kind of a movie.
Remember when we all thought that this was what the internet would look like? Me either.Johnny is a courier. He transports data, in a brain implant. His capacity is 80 gigs (160 with a doubler). I think there are iPods with that kind of storage space now! You have to forgive that though, I mean, in 95, 80 gigs would have seemed as massive as 80 terrabytes would now.
That's some high tech shit right there.It was still a pretty bad movie in 95, though. What can you do? Bad is timeless. There is no rational reason for my love of this movie. I'm not even sure that there is an irrational explanation! Something about it though, 20 years from now I won't be able to put my finger on it.
The story itself is pretty laughable, but the acting is even worse! When Johnny gets pissed off, and goes into a tirade,
"Listen. You listen to me. You see that city over there? THAT'S where I'm supposed to be. Not down here with the dogs, and the garbage, and the fucking last month's newspapers blowing *back* and *forth*. I've had it with them, I've had it with you, I've had it with ALL THIS - I want ROOM SERVICE! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered... like they do... at the Imperial Hotel... in Tokyo."You don't sympathize with him. You sit and laugh and say "what the shit cock was that?" Ice-T was possibly the best actor in the movie! Rollins was ridiculous as a doctor. Not because he couldn't play a doctor, just because the character was a joke.
Like I said though, I love it. And not just because of the soundtrack (which is pretty good).
It's crazy to look at in a way, I mean, in the mid 90's there were a lot of movies like this. We just had no idea what life with computers really was going to be like. The internet was so new. Now, I still don't think we know what life with computers will be like in the future, but I think we've realized that it won't be too different.
I'm going to give it 7 doubles of myself so that I can hack my own brain out of 10, even though honestly I know it only deserves 4 muscles relaxers injected into my spine to relieve the symptoms of my Nerve Attenuation Syndrome out of 10. Though, had I been doing this back in 97, I would have given it 8 and a half street preachers run over with my van on the way to the hospital out of 10.
