
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 27, 1995                   TAG: 9505300092
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CARYN JAMES NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`JOHNNY MNEMONIC' IS A SHABBY IMITATION OF GREATER MOVIES

Keanu Reeves is not supposed to be a robot or an android or any other humanoid form in ``Johnny Mnemonic,'' but from his robotic delivery you'd never guess he's meant to be a flesh-and-blood man with a memory chip implanted in his brain.

The date is 2021, and Johnny is an overambitious courier whose head contains more gigabytes than he can handle. He has 24 hours to get rid of the excess information or his head will explode.

That is a problem, because he has only part of the access code he needs to download the memory. (This is what happens if you misplace your PIN number.)

And there is the more immediate danger that Johnny's head will be lopped off before he can get the rest of the code. A ruthless pharmaceutical company wants the information and sends Japanese hit men to chop off Johnny's head and preserve it cryogenically.

Though the film was written by the cyberpunk master William Gibson from his own story and was directed by the artist Robert Longo, ``Johnny Mnemonic'' looks and feels like a shabby imitation of ``Blade Runner'' and ``Total Recall.''

It is a disaster in every way. There is little tension in the story despite the ever-present threat of an exploding brain. The special effects that take us on a tour of the information superhighway - traveling inside the circuits of Johnny's brain, or viewing his search for information while wearing virtual reality headgear - look no better than a CD-ROM.

Visually, the rest of the film looks murky, as if the future were one big brown-toned mud puddle.

Ice-T, a good actor who has had bad luck with his roles, is relegated to the stereotypical part of J-Bone, the leader of the Lo-Teks, an inner-city street gang based in what is known as the Free City of Newark. The Lo-Teks are stuck in the 1990s with banks of televisions and satellites instead of new toys.

Dina Meyer plays Johnny's tough-cookie bodyguard, Jane. Dolph Lundgren plays a Jesus-obsessed hit man who wears a robe and carries a shepherd's staff.

Henry Rollins, varying only slightly from his spoken-word performances, plays a ranting doctor trying to cure Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, a disease that causes people to shake as if their circuits were overloaded. Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, he explains, is caused by information overload.

Think of ``Johnny Mnemonic'' as a carrier.

Johnny Mnemonic

A Tri-Star Pictures and Peter Hoffman release showing at the Valley View Mall 6 and Salem Valley 8. 98 minutes. Rated R for violence.

by CNB