He might have spent the last decade killing henchmen in well-lit nightclubs in the “John Wick” franchise, but many will always remember Keanu Reeves as the hacker trying to bend spoons and dodge bullets as Neo in “The Matrix” movies. The groundbreaking film about a future ruled by machines even checks Neil deGrasse Tyson’s box as a personal favourite sci-fi movie. However, there was one science fiction movie before the Wachowskis’ masterpiece that Reeves starred in that received nowhere near the same reception. In 1995, Reeves starred in “Johnny Mnemonic,” which became the only feature film directed by Robert Longo. The movie was adapted from the 1981 short story of the same name by William Gibson and took viewers into a hyperfast cyberpunk future set in 2021, where the internet rules the world.
With information becoming a highly valuable commodity, Johnny is a mnemonic courier who uses his brain to transfer data to the highest bidder. His latest job has Johnny on the run from hostile corporations and a Bible-quoting assassin (Dolph Lundgren), ending with our hero meeting a highly intelligent dolphin that might save humanity. Sounds exciting, right? Unfortunately, these wild elements weren’t enough to make “Johnny Mnemonic” a success, and Reeves’ pre-“Matrix” film was a box office failure, earning a domestic box office of $19 million against a budget of $26 million. It’s only in the years that followed that the film has gained a cult following as a sci-fi entry ahead of its time, but with a terribly flawed execution.
Johnny Mnemonic was a misunderstood bomb
Sitting on Rotten Tomatoes with a dire score of only 20%, “Johnny Mnemonic” was deemed by Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times as “one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn’t deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.” Caryn James of The New York Times called the film “a shabby imitation of ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Total Recall'” and “a disaster in every way.” Even with its criticisms, though, a common opinion was that the world simply wasn’t ready for Johnny’s story, at least on the big screen. Roxana Hadidi of Crooked Marquee said, “Johnny Mnemonic is no ‘The Matrix,’ its world-building lacks specifically nuanced grit. But the ideas Gibson thrust forward furthered the cyberpunk conversation onscreen for years to come.”
There’s certainly some truth to that, with Longo’s film almost carrying the torch of tech-noir, futuristic films that came before it, only to stumble along the way. Story beats that included artificial enhancements and people being implanted with information would recur often in Reeves’ work in the years that followed. Besides “The Matrix,” Reeves also appeared as Johnny Silverhand in the video game “Cyberpunk 2077,” which got its own spin-off show, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners,” an incredible Netflix video game anime adaptation with a 100 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s these stories and so many others that have “Johnny Mnemonic” to thank, along with many more to come.
