This film begins in the near future with a plague known as "the Nerve Attenuation Syndrome" causing widespread damage to the economies of the world resulting in the major corporations assuming control over everything. And to further strengthen their grip on their spheres of power the corporations hire the Yakuza to ruthlessly enforce their control over all technological data to keep it away from their rivals. This secrecy subsequently produces a new method of espionage in which an electronically enhanced person stores vast amounts of data into his brain and is therefore able to move from one corporate sphere to another to deliver this information for a certain price. One such courier is "Johnny Mnemonic" (Keanu Reeves) who is offered a generous sum of money to download an extremely large program in Beijing and deliver it to another corporation in Newark. However, the data that he agrees to accept is many times larger than his storage capacity allows and as a result his life is put in serious jeopardy if he cannot have it extracted within a few days. Needless to say, the corporation he stole the data from desperately wants it back and immediately puts out a lucrative contract on his head-literally. To complicate matters even more, what he doesn't know is that his agent, "Ralfi" (Udo Kier) has betrayed him to the highest bidder and as a result he is forced to go underground where all manner of criminals and misfits are waiting for him. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a film with enormous potential but was badly served by some of the rather ridiculous characters displayed--with the "Street Preacher" (Dolph Lundgren) being especially annoying. Likewise, the lack of chemistry between Johnny Mnemonic and his bodyguard "Jane" (Dina Meyer) was also quite noticeable. Be that as it my, as stated earlier this film had enormous potential. Unfortunately, it failed to live up to it to a great degree and as a result I rate is as only average.
Review of Johnny Mnemonic
