-Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic
When Sci-Fi films are bad, like that little girl with the curl in the nursery rhyme, they are horrid. So it's nice to see that a whole web site has taken the time to examine just what makes bad sci-fi, and bad movies in general, fail miserably. From Jabootu.com, a scathing review of Johnny Mnemonic, an adaptation of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. I pulled out some of the funniest quotes, which rather obscures the already poorly-thought-out storyline. Brief plot synopsis: In the year 2021, courier Johnny Mnemonic's brain has an implanted storage device that holds a whopping 160 gigabytes of data transferred from a computer.(How quickly storage technology has advanced since 1995!) He overloads his brain with 240 gigs of data that, in addition to wiping his memory, might get him killed. Let the funny begin!
"Now it’s time to meet the film’s most ludicrous character, which is saying something. Learning that Laser Whip Guy has again failed to capture Johnny, Takahashi contacts Street Preacher, a priest with the Church of the Retransfiguration. Since this is a Sci-Fi movie, religion must be played up as the occupation of nutbags."
"Man, you know you’re watching a Science Fiction film when someone implies that Keanu Reeves ‘has a lot of stuff in his head.’"
"Still hoping to attract the attention of the guards, Johnny picks up some garbage can lids and performs a one man ‘Stomp’ impression. Hmm. I wouldn’t really say that Keanu Reeves noisily bashing trashcan lids together in a desperate attempt to gain the notice of uninterested viewers is a metaphor for his career. Just that the thought kind of crossed my mind."
"Johnny relates how he almost had a memory."
"So, to cut an extremely stupid story short, Johnny meets Jones, who turns out to be, not a dolphin augmented by the Navy, but a really bad muppet of a dolphin who’s been augmented by the Navy. Yep. A dolphin. Because, you know, they’re so smart. And this one’s augmented, to boot. I mean, Flipper was so intelligent that "no one you see, is smarter than he." And he wasn’t even augmented.
You really have to be watching this to get the full effect of just what a fiasco it is. First, the ‘groovy’ idea of the super-intelligent dolphin seems like something that hippies would come up with after hours spent sucking on a bong. To actually see it in the flesh just makes concrete how stupid the concept really is.
And that’s if we were, in fact, seeing it in the flesh. Instead, we’re obviously seeing it in the latex. The comically inept ‘dolphin’ prop seen here just adds a level of low farce to what was already intellectually specious anyway. The fact that this is supposed to be the film’s ultimate blowout plot twist breaks the final straw. Imagine Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now imagine watching the entire film, only to see them use one of Ed Wood’s pie-tins-on-a-string for the climatic Mothership sequence. That’s about how well ‘Jones’ delivers on his promise.
Johnny calls the dolphin a ‘fish’ and gets zapped with some sort of sonic beam by the touchy aquatic mammal. Boy, I hope it never reads my description of it."
"Squibs are wee explosives that are detonated under clothing to similate an actor being shot. They also are used to blow open sacs of stage blood to create a bleeding effect. Here, we see squibs detonated on actor Takeshi’s back.
Yet, for a ‘cool’ effect, we also see squibs detonated on his chest. These, clearly, must represent exit wounds - the initial squib indicates the bullet entering his back, followed by a chest squib to indicate the bullet having punched completely through his torso. Neat-o keen, huh!
The only problem is that Johnny is standing directly in front of him!"
"Sob. I’ll never forgot you, Electronic Ghost Woman!"
"And yes, this is all mighty confusing. Therefore, J-Bone is given a monitor on which to watch the VR field, which allows him to throw out nuggets of exposition to the audience. For instance, when the Virus makes its appearance, CGI Johnny produces a mirror image of itself. "He’s doubling himself," J-Bone notes. Thanks, Exposition Man!"
I do wonder how he can wish for Keanu Reeves' head to explode without reference to Scanners? And how can he blast hippie visions of talking dolphins without alluding to Day of the Dolphin? Perhaps he didn't want to sully their mediocrity with the truly craptacular.
Jabootu.com is somewhat uneven. Lately the Jabootu reviewers have turned their asperous gaze upon the impoverished children's cartoon of decades past, Superfriends. As another cartoon character has said, "Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?" Still, all of the film reviews are by people who love movies and have a good sense of what makes a movie fail. What's more, since the Internet has no word limit, they are free to summarize and critique entire plots, subplots, dialogue and scenes in a way that your average newspaper film critic can't spare the space for. Sometimes the reviewers even rewrite scenes and entire movie plots that actually work. It's like an expanded version of The Onion's "Films that Time Forgot" section, or a shorter text version of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. There are two excellent reviews of Battlefield "Travolta Unbound" Earth, as well as Star Trek V: Shatner at Work and the mind-numbingly atrocious Tom Green gross-out vehicle "Freddy got Fingered," the very mention of which still provokes a low-pitched shuddering groan from one of my sisters who was unfortunate enough to see it. Imagining "What would Jabootu.com say?" is an excellent way to purge one's speech of cant and one's plotting of cliche.
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