Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

In short: He Never Died (2015)

Jack (Henry Rollins) is a human blood-drinking, flesh-eating immortal. Actually, he’s a very specific immortal, but that’s neither here nor there. He has gone cold turkey on the murders that generally come with this sort of thing outside of YA novels and survives on a diet of small amounts of black market blood he buys from one of those body part hoking interns (Booboo Stewart) you find in every movie hospital. That diet isn’t too good for Jack’s personality though, and he spends his life sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, playing bingo, sleeping, keeping any given conversation ambiguously monosyllabic and ordering “hot tea” (one shudders to think what he’d get if he only said “tea”) in a local diner. Waitress Cara (Kate Greenhouse) is the closest Jack gets to actual human contact, and for reasons only known to her, she seems to have taken a bit of a shine to him.

Things will change for Jack when Andrea (Jordan Todosey), the daughter he didn’t know about, appears in his life, and he gets involved in his intern blood dealer’s trouble with some low level gangsters.

Tonally, Jason Krawczyk’s He Never Died is as far away from most other contemporary horror comedies as possible. There’s nothing zany here, and the film’s not interested in being parodic or self-consciously weird either. Instead, the humour here is bone dry, driven by Jack’s skewed attempts at pretending to be a normal human being, his peculiar interactions, and the quiet joy it brings to watch Henry Rollins play bingo.

Despite quite a body count – a part of which is held elegantly off-screen because once the audience has seen what Jack can do, it doesn’t need to be shown again and again which makes an interesting comparison to something like the much more mainstream Denzel Washington Equalizer that has certain obvious plot parallels  – I’d describe Krawczyk’s film as low key, approaching a surprisingly far-reaching mythology as matter-of-factly as it does its view of big city life, and never seeming afraid to just let things stand without detailed explanation and let the audience think about them a bit.

There’s a fine bit of irony going on here, too, with Jack being the more bizarrely literal-minded and socially awkward the less he’s involved in drinking blood, eating flesh and making a bloody mess. He’s more functional as an actual human being when he’s acting like a monster, which I find rather difficult not to read as a rather poignant choice of the film’s writer/director.

Rollins, not exactly the picture of variety when working as an actor (so just like when he’s working as a musician), is pretty much perfect here, breathing life into Jack’s awkwardness and weirdness and nailing his more human phases too. That Rollins, even in his mid-50s, can still embody physical threat when necessary is no surprise at all, of course.

In short: The Last Heist (2016)

A group of former military operators led by one Paul (Torrance Coombs) is starting on what looks like the easiest heist possible. Their target is a deposit box vault that has nearly been closed down, and is only open to let a very few remaining customers get their valuables back. Consequently, there are only two people still working there, no security at all (which obviously stretches belief, but so will much of what’s to come), and there won’t be all that many civilians to control. But where’s the payoff for crime in this case, one might very well ask oneself. Turns out, there is something rather valuable in one of the deposit boxes still in house. We’ll even learn the what and why of this very special thing but because it belongs to one of the many, many complications the film will throw in, it’s not strictly necessary to explain.

Anyway, one of the guys working the place today is Danny (Michael Aaron Milligan) who just happens to be Paul’s brother. For what I can only assume to be good reasons the script just forgets to mention, Paul at once unmasks when he sees Danny, dooming the civilians to potential murder by some of his more bloodthirsty companions. Speaking of bloodthirsty, one of these civilians – and as it so happens the one ideally placed to not get tied up by Paul’s cohorts – turns out to be Los Angeles’s top serial killer, known as “Windows” because he likes to cut out the eyes of his victims after death, which just might complicate things further. Add that Danny quickly manages to send off a text message to the 911 line, and soon the police as represented by Sergeant Pascal (Victoria Pratt) gets involved too.

The script will add further complications, but I think I can stop here. As is quite obvious, the script to Mike Mendez’ The Last Heist (written by Guy Stevenson who also has a minor role in front of the camera) tries to get around that most notorious problem of many a modern low budget action film, the somewhat problematic fact that these films can’t actually afford to show much action, by replacing the escalations that would mean stuff actually needed to happen with complications that mostly give the characters opportunity to have more stuff to stand around and talk about.

It’s a daring approach, and not one I’m keen to encounter too often, but it is something of an improvement in so much as the characters don’t have to talk about the same stuff again and again to fill out the running time. Hooray, I guess.

Though seriously, The Last Heist is mildly diverting, mostly because the actors are good enough – with Rollins and Pratt the obvious stand-outs, the former in voluntary hilarity, the latter in professionalism – and because Mendez does his best to keep the not exactly exciting happenings visually interesting. There’s only so much that can be done without the money for about two action scenes, of course, but it’s the thought that counts in filmmaking, right?