Keanu Reeves’ Most Misunderstood Sci-Fi Thriller Is Actually A Camp Classic
What if I told you 'Johnny Mnemonic' is better than 'The Matrix'?
If loving Johnny Mnemonic is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. For three decades, the Keanu Reeves-led cyberpunk film that predated The Matrix has been generally classified as a misfire and an embarrassment to both the subgenre and the genius of author William Gibson. Reviews in 1995 were bad, and today, on Rotten Tomatoes, Johnny Mnemonic holds a sad 20 percent score from critics, and 31 percent from general audiences. I don’t think these scores could or should go much higher, but I also think that it’s possible that a huge portion of the population has miswatched and misunderstood this film.
Intentionally or not, Johnny Mnemonic is a camp masterpiece. And 30 years ago, when it hit theaters on May 26, 1995, it propelled a certain aesthetic of sci-fi into the mainstream, permanently. Somewhat famously, The Wachowskis offered Johnny Mnemonic as an example of what they were trying to do when trying to secure funding for The Matrix. In other words, Johnny Mnemonic fell out of bed half-inebriated so The Matrix could fly. But now that it’s been several decades since all of these movies have come out, Johnny Mnemonic’s own artistic merits can be found not in its profundity, but instead, in its sheer, unadulterated entertainment value.
Like the short 1981 William Gibson short story upon which it is based, the titular Johnny (Reeves) is a data courier who smuggles data for different organizations. Not unlike several Mission: Impossible movies, the question of what is embedded in a certain set of data occupies much of the mystery of Johnny Mnemonic, but, like some of Gibson’s most enduring novels, connecting the dots of the caper is perhaps slightly less fun than allowing yourself to be immersed in the style. Like the novel Neuromancer (which is a sideways sequel to the short story), the sci-fi tech aspects of Johnny Mnemonic were dated even before the movie came out. Somewhat hilariously, one of the opening titles reveals “The Internet, 2021,” in what looks like an unholy combination of The Lawnmower Man and Tron. (The time-traveling bastard child of this kind of thing, by the way, is the William Shatner TV series TekWar, which somehow predated the movie version of Johnny Mnemonic by one year.)
As in the short story, Johnny takes on a job that is bigger than anything he’s done before, and in doing so, overloads his brain to the point that if he doesn’t get the data out soon, he’ll be brain-dead. And worse yet, the expensive data will be corrupted!
So, the premise of the movie is that Keanu Reeves’ brain will explode if he doesn’t get the data out of his head that he put there in the first place. After Speed was a big hit in 1994, people must have started to believe that Reeves could only do big movies in which a bizarre ticking clock was involved. But, like Speed, what makes Johnny Mnemonic so watchable 30 years later is its hyperbolic premise, combined with a kind of baroque performance from Reeves. When you rewatch the movie, you’ll doubtlessly laugh at the way he delivers the line “we already have...ice,” and if you’re not laughing, then do you have a sense of humor?
The supporting cast of Johnny Mnemonic are all equally as good as Reeves, and seemingly all in on the fact that the movie is nuts. Dolph Lundgren as Karl is particularly underrated here, as is sci-fi stalwart Dina Meyers, who was still two years away from her turn as Dizzy in Starship Troopers. Add Ice-T as J-Bone into the mix, and you’ve got yourself an iconic 1990s cast in a movie so relentless that, today, you have to wonder why nobody gave it a chance.
Keanu Reeves prepares to enter the matrix. No not that one.
Directed by Robert Longo, with a script from Gibson himself, the final cut of the film itself was the result of endless studio meddling, so much so that Longo stepped away from the final editing process out of frustration. In 2022, a black-and-white longer cut of Johnny Mnemonic was released for home video, which Longo claimed was a bit closer to what he had hoped for: a film full of irony.
But the true irony is that, despite its flaws, Johnny Mnemonic works in 2025 slightly better than it worked in 1995. Today, we’re free from the burden of caring if any of it is realistic or not, giving the film a surreal, almost theatrical quality. In 1995, for mainstream movie studios, cyberpunk was a buzzword. But now, it's like an artistic movement, and so, studying one piece from that artistic movement is inherently joyful, assuming you’re interested in that genre even a little bit.
The history of science fiction is the history of fans making excuses for low-quality work that had high aspirations. And by that metric, Johnny Mnemonic is a classic. Where it failed in 1995, it succeeds now. And where it fails now hardly matters, because it’s just too damn fun.
