Johnny Mnemonic ★★★★☆

Every scene and subplot feels very disconnected from each other, each location and set of costumes feel like it came from a different production from the one before, and most of them not really coming across as fully formed. It would have taken a much larger budget to make it properly work but it also would be a lot less charming and the end result is just so much fun.

Some of that is just in the script, though. There is a pretty simple main plot and a lot of the runtime is spent throwing extra obstacles at Johnny that were not part of the original short story, which don’t tend to overlap with each other much. In the climax every antagonist lines to be neatly dealt with one by one.

I watched a fan edit which like many such edits cuts in a lot of deleted scenes and extra footage from other versions of the movie at much worse quality that mostly fail to add much of anything other than padding the runtime but does include Ice-T making sure we know that the dolphin is addicted to heroin and also has the least-transphobic joke of any Hollywood movie from 1995 and it’s very important to me to keep those bits in.

Also shoutout to my friend Tigris, who on seeing Takeshi credited in the opening titles joked that Takeshi from Takeshi’s Castle was in the movie, not knowing who Beat Takeshi was and not realising that she was actually correct.