Nestled in between Speed and The Matrix is a Keanu Reeves film that often gets forgotten. And, I gotta say, it’s a little ironic that a movie with the word Mnemonic in it would be forgotten. And yet… here we are.

I had never seen Johnny Mnemonic until I checked it out on Netflix this week. I can’t believe I missed this 90’s classic. But, I’m excited to talk about it on today’s Movie Tuesday.

Here is a video version of this review:

I love going back and watching what they thought the future would be like in 90’s movies, so this film was right up my alley. Last year, I watched Virtuosity, which came out the same year as Johnny Mnemonic, and which is totally awesome too. But, Johnny Mnemonic is even better.

Let’s start with the Star Wars-esque title crawl. It is trying to do some world-building with text on screen, which I suppose is easier than actually filming it. The filmmakers were going with a tell, don’t show ethos on this one. But, after the title crawl, we are treated to a delightful look at what they thought the internet would be like in 2021.

It’s a VR phantasmagoria if I’ve ever seen one, which leads me to believe that Zuckerberg may have liked this movie too.

The conceit of the movie is that valuable data is transported by mnemonic courier. They implant data into the brains of the courier then the courier travels and offloads the little usb stick in their brain. I guess they spent all that money on building VR representations of storefronts in this version of the future internet that they forgot to build in encrypted file transfer to their technology stack.

So our hero, Keanu Reeves AKA Johnny Mnemonic, has a 160 Gigabyte hard drive in his head that he loads with 320 Gigabytes of data. We learn that overloading your brain hard drive can cause synaptic leakage, so he needs to offload the data at the destination within 24 hours or he dies. The data can be decrypted with a decryption key that they fax to the destination. Yep. They fax it.

I mean, when this movie was made Hank Williams Jr. was already faxing beers so…

I suppose it would be difficult to predict how much data would be flying across the internet back in 1995. I for one like the exact numbers they use because it adds to the ridiculousness of it all. It makes the movie dated, but dated is what I’m looking for. Eerily correct depictions of the future make you uneasy. Over the top depictions are a fun popcorn-watch.

The data on this particular mission is wanted by the Yakuza. It has something to do with the Neural Attenuation Syndrome alluded to in the title crawl. Spoiler alert… it’s the cure to NAS. That won’t make you enjoy this movie any less, but that’s what Johnny’s carrying.

Johnny is chased by the Yakuza and their hired killer the Street Preacher, played by Dolph Lundgren. The head Yakuza hunting for him has a badass future weapon that he uses to cut off peoples limbs and heads. It’s totally badass.

Johnny’s chief ally is a body guard played by Dina Meyer who is Diz from Starship Troopers. She becomes his love interest. Ice-T shows up as the leader of the Low Teks—a luddite resistance group. And Henry Rollins is in it too. He plays a doctor.

You can probably guess that this is a chase thriller with a techno-futurist twist. It proceeds according to Hoyle. It is not breaking any new ground. But, I loved everything about it. Honestly, Keanu, Dolph, Ice-T—they’re not exactly Laurence Olivier, but their style of acting is perfect for this movie. It is a dumb action thriller and I loved every minute of it. I give it a B+. Totally worth the watch. That’s all I’ve got for today. Goodbye.