Best Keanu: “I want room service!”

There are a few subsets of bad Keanu Reeves movies. There are the bad movies that are cringeworthy and/or disgraceful, and having watched them, I would be glad to see evaporate from my consciousness. I put Dangerous Liaisons and The Night Before in this category.

Then there are the “bad” movies whose technical flaws you just can’t ignore, but that offer something unique and enjoyable. These, in my book, aren’t “bad” movies so much — but it’s hard to pretend that Replicas has enlightening dialogue, even if it has real heart and an interesting premise.

Then there are the just-plain-bad Keanu Reeves movies. Maybe they’ve not stood the test of time, fell victim to competing artistic visions, or just somehow got pushed out of the gate before they were polished. Johnny Mnemonic is one such film. It’s just plain bad. It’s not offensive or cringe-y, but its ideas — perhaps once radical — seem dated and there’s not a whole lot of human emotion to make up for the tired premise.

Perhaps, in 1995, the idea of an evil pharmaceutical corporation keeping people sick to make a profit was new, or maybe it was new when William Gibson originally wrote the story upon which Johnny Mnemonic is based. The idea of a dystopian, tech-addled future (cyberpunk) certainly was not new. But in 2022, there’s little left to capture the imagination — not even a screaming Keanu, exasperated because he’s lost his life of luxury as he’s trying to get the cure for a global pandemic downloaded out of his brain.

Some segments are interesting, even in 2022. There’s a particular delight in seeing artistic renderings of what the “inside” of the internet looks like, as a space where people can communicate in a virtual world. Of course now that radical idea is in many ways our reality, and the film — set in 2021 — has an interesting (although somewhat inaccurate) prediction of what being inside a virtual space might be.

It’s fun, Johnny Mnemonic, and you feel outrageously sorry for the dolphin. Plus, you get to see Dina Meyer, who may forever be Joey’s true love in that famous arc from Friends. It’s an easy way to spend a couple of hours, if you want to remember what the 1990s thought that the 2020s might become.

June 2022