Duckman

Rogier van Bakel's excellent piece on Duckman in the current Wired ....

Johnny Mnemonic

I love this movie – directed by Robert Longo based on the short story by William Gibson. (With a script by Gibson, adapting the short, sharp shock of his original short story.)

It’s a fun ride. A heaping helping of comicbooky, lurid, cyberpunk fun. It has a few flaws, but they don’t spoil the ride. The premise ...

In the not too distant future, data smugglers function as human zip drives with the aid of brain implants. One of these smugglers, the title character(Keanu Reeves), stuffs his skull with too much data. If he doesn’t get it out soon, he dies. (A literal case of too much information.) To make matters worse, an evil corporation is trying to kill Johnny before he can make the delivery.

That plot is, basically, an excuse for wretched excess – which is exactly the way I like it. This film has everything, people. Yakuza badasses. A ninja hitman with a one-molecule-thick filament wire in his thumb he employs to slice people to ribbons. Udo Kier, as a sleaze-bag who winds up getting sliced. Another hitman (Dolph Lundgren) who looks like Jesus on steroids who’s replaced every bone in his body with an indestructible metal skeleton. Ice T as the leader of the LoTeks. Henry Rollins, the lead singer from Black Flag, as an outlaw doctor specializing in cybernetic enhancements. Keanu Reeves, attempting to act. He can't. OK. That’d be Flaw Number One, I guess.

There’s a great speech where Keanu’s courier character screams about his need for classy hookers and nice suits. He doesn’t quite pull it off, but it’s OK. I know where he’s coming from.

Second flaw, Dina Meyer isn’t quite threatening enough as Jane (Molly Millions in the original story) – the badass freelance muscle girl who becomes Johnny’s protector.

The film's main flaw is mostly budget. As in the lack thereof. Longo didn’t have enough money and it sometimes shows. But – being an artist before he was a director – he’s creative as hell and manages to fill his world with inventive, multilayered imagery that doesn’t seem like yet-another, derivative, Blade Runner ripoff.

On top of that, there’s some seriously subversive cyberpunk humor in Gibson’s script. I was constantly laughing my ass off. My favorite line?

Dolph Lundgren, as the pumped-up Killer-Christ-Figure, goes into a bar looking for information. The bartender, Hooky, has a high-tech, cybernetic hand. Dolph’s “Street Preacher” character looks around in disgust and spouts a suitably judgmental, prophetic passage from Isaiah.

Street Preacher: They err in vision, they stumble in judgment, for all the tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean.

Hooky: You should have seen it before.

Hilarious.

At movie's end, Dolph's metal-boned character is fried by a microwave burst from the junkie dolphin and a jolt from a severed high-tension wire, which he winds up holding in a ghastly parody of crucifixion. That’s comedy, people.

Gibson’s script puts the “punk” back into cyberpunk – “punk” as in sneering, disrespectful, rude, anti-authoritarian, fearless, original and sarcastically vicious. Longo’s movie did justice to that material – though I wish he had more cash to burn. Who cares? The ride was fun while it lasted.

I love this movie.