Critic Reviews

Perhaps it’s quaint, but it’s also watchable, and it is the kind of sci-fi that is genuinely audacious, trying to envisage what the future will be like – and often succeeding.

Written by William Gibson, who adapted his own short story, and directed by New York artist Robert Longo in his feature debut, Johnny Mnemonic is inescapably a very cool movie. Running at a fevered pace, with laser and light explosions, it introduces a fantastic yet plausible vision of a computer-dominated age.

For his first shot at feature filmmaking, Longo does an admirable job of keeping the story line rocketing along, though his seeming attempts to out-Blade Runner Ridley Scott in the decaying cityscape department grow wearisome and the occasional wooden drivel that Reeves spouts adds a bit of unintentional humor to the proceedings.

Johnny Mnemonic is 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.

A somewhat-smarter-than-average science-fiction flick.

Keanu Reeves plays a "courier" with a lot of top-secret data stashed in his brain; it's clearly interfering with his minimal acting capabilities, causing several moments of unintentional (but welcome) humor.

The movie is a series of ostentatious effects, without much sense of narrative momentum or rhythmic pacing, and it leaves you feeling like you've landed on a treadmill. [26 May 1995, p.E3]

The gleefully campy moments will earn Johnny Mnemonic cult status. Part of the movie's problem, though, is that it can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a satire, and it falls apart when it tries to do both. [27 May 1995]

Longo and Gibson have so little interest in the personalities of the characters that the actors seem like stand-ins for computer-generated images. [27 May 1995, p.A2]

All in all, it's better than your average boy-meets-girl techno-thriller - but only just. [30 May 1995, p.5D]