'Johnny Mnemonic' best left buried in memory

By Jason Tedjasukmana

JAKARTA (JP): With the blockbuster summer in full swing in the States, it seems some alternative rockers off the Lollapalooza roster have found work elsewhere -- in Johnny Mnemonic, the latest film by New York artist Robert Longo.

Henry Rollins, the angst-rock wordsmith formerly of Black Flag, and Ice-T, Body Count front man and all-purpose hipster heavy (Ricochet, New Jack City) may live on the wrong side of Newark, but they're on the right side of justice in this film of animated anarchy. (Detroit residents must be thrilled that their city was for once not chosen as the devastated and detritus- ridden city of the future.) Enlisted to help Johnny (aka Johnny Mnemonic, Just Johnny, or perhaps Just Johnny Moronic) extract 320 gigabytes of simmering data from his Keanu Reeves brain, Henry Rollins, Ice-T and a herd of Billy Idol video extras use their streetwise sensibilities to outsmart the Japanese yakuza who are after Johnny's head full of bootlegged data from the Pharmakom corporation.

Based on William Gibson's 1981 sci-fi short story of the same name, Johnny Mnemonic picks up where Michael Jackson's Thriller video left off, with the techno-warped mutants now leaving their cemetery digs behind for a deluxe junkyard, or Heaven Node, in the sky. As a video game (Sony Imagesoft has created a CD-ROM version, sans Keanu) Johnny Mnemonic may have made for an interesting interactive experience. Once adapted to the screen, however, Johnny goes the way of Mario Bros or Tron in its lack of a storyline with any significant hook or clear purpose, leaving the viewer up a creek without a joystick.

As a passive, on-screen experience the viewer's patience is tried as the film meanders from one post-apocalyptic set to the next. Visualization seems to be the main preoccupation of director Robert Longo, who, like fellow New York artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel, is now hoping to make a painterly splash on the big screen. Unfortunately, the artistic input of Jean-Phillip Carp (the brilliant set designer behind Delicatessen) and the impressive sequences of computer-animated battles in cyberspace are not convincing enough to save the film from its tedious dialog and mediocre direction.

Moronic

It is approximately the year 2021 and a neurological virus called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, or NAS, is devastating the population. Johnny has sacrificed portions of his long term memory, and recollection of his childhood, to embark on a promising career as a mnemonic courier that smuggles information by way of a computer implant in his head. On his latest assignment, Johnny greedily feeds his head with a barrage of information that twice exceeds his brain's storage limit, only to find his head hemorrhaging with information that could save humanity from the dreaded NAS virus. (Put into perspective, 320 gigabytes of information could roughly be stored on 500 CD-ROMs.)

Enter the yakuza, who want Johnny's head on a platter and the NAS cure in their pocket. Love-interest/bodyguard Dina Meyer is afflicted by the black shakes, an NAS side effect, and convulses her way into Johnny's heart. The two are subsequently pursued, much like Ola Ray and Michael Jackson, by commandos, ninjas, angry boardroom directors and a Jesus-freak played by Dolph Lundgren, all of whom have been contracted to bring in the bytes. The two are then forced to seek help from the LoTeks, an underground network of hackers dedicated to disseminating technological truth in the face of a monolithic corporate culture run amok.

Apart from the cliched battles and bloodletting, Keanu Reeves has not turned in a more wooden performance since sitting his bronzed body underneath a bodhi tree in Little Buddha, Bernardo Bertolucci's film of equal infamy. Reeves looks as though he could have fallen off a Longo canvas in his skinny black suit and tie, but his comic-book character is no more animated than the string of requisite one-liners that now plague the action-flick genre. "Double cheese with anchovies?" is how he enters one room. In another scene he quips, "Next time knock, Baldy," after tossing a clean-shaven villain through a plate-glass door.

Facing decimation in one anguished moment of self-pity, Reeves stands Moses-like on a heap of wreckage and screams, "I just want room service, $10,000-a-night hookers and to have my shirts laundered at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." Not your usual last request but quite typical of the dialog in this film, which purports to have some deeper meaning. Keanu's credo is summed up when he states that his life's philosophy has been to be careful to stay in one corner in order to avoid complications. Now, much to his dismay, he's confronted with the utilitarian task of sacrificing his own life for the greater good of humanity.

To look at Johnny Mnemonic on a deeper level, however, would be disingenuous. TriStar Pictures (which, not coincidentally, is owned by Sony), spent over $35 million dollars to make a film that would appeal to teenage vidiots, not discriminating sci-fi filmgoers. The characters of Johnny Mnemonic are ultimately left as flat as the paintings of Robert Longo, whose talent for directing experimental films and rock videos is less convincing on a feature-length film level.

And while the film's theme of globalized technology balkanizing society into those with access and those without is a provocative topic, the film treats the prospect as just another work of gangster fiction. For as visual as they may seem, the works of William Gibson, the Vancouver-based author of Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light and other cyberpunk novels, may be better off left on the page.