30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 12

            I decided to do the 30 day movie challenge as a blog series as it ties into my blog activities rather easily and I am once again not blogging my usual series with regularity in spite of saying that I would.

            Today is "A Movie from an actor I Hate".  Let me put this clearly out there, this movie fails for a lot of reasons, and the main actor is merely the largest and most spectacular of those failures, but in addition it has plotting problems, internal logic problems, and so completely rips off the plot of "Total Recall" I want to call this movie borderline plagiarism.  The movie is "Johnny Mnemonic", the actor is Keanu Reeves.

Ice T is in this too, he runs a gang of urban poor freedom fighters, and since they share the same role as "Total Recall's" mutants, I'm guessing the face tattoos and goggles are to fill in for a lack of mutation make up in the budget.

            Don't watch this movie.  Ever.  Nothing in it works.  Giant cyborg priest assassin, comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.  The ultimate weapon at the end of the film, a cyborg dolphin, and it is far dumber and more pathetic looking than it sounds.  There is a guy who has a cybernetic thumb, the nail of which can be pulled out to create a whip (there is a spool of magical wire that can cut through anything like a light saber wound up in his thumb).

            There is a scene in which the protagonist is confronted by two arch villains, one of which has two goons with him, when Johnny kills the arch villain with the goons... this is hard to explain, the orphaned goons start following the orders of the other arch villain without explanation.  That is like Hell's Angels bikers and a mafia hitman showing up to kill a loan shark, and when the loan shark kills the biker gang leader, all of the bikers just start talking orders from the Hitman.  There are scenes like that all over this movie, when people come and go and work together without any reason to.  You might think that the DVD is skipping, when in fact the only thing wrong with the movie is that is has a terrible movie on it.

Seriously, that thing to his immediate right, is a mother fucking cyborg dolphin.

            And what the hell else can be said about Keanu Reeves except that he is a black hole of talent.  No line ever said by this man wasn't done in a tone of self parody.  Reeves has been in two movies I have liked, "Constantine" and "The Matrix".  "Matrix" was good in spite of him, and "Constantine" was good in spite of him.  How does he keep getting work?

Let's forget for a second that the source material is as British as the Stamp Tax and just go with the idea of an American adaptation.  How wouldn't this movie have been better with Robert Downy Junior or Leonardo DiCaprio, or even the guy who played Hurley on "Lost", at least they have charisma and can read a line without ironic inflection creeping in.

            He has had work doing Shakespeare in a legitimate production.  A Kenneth Branagh production!  And even though Shakespeare has a cadence to the words in his scripts, all of that sounds like the clunk and clatter of broken instruments coming out of Reeves mouth.  And I include this to show the sheer broadness of his opportunities to do something other than suck, to do work that has dignity, and how constantly he has failed to do anything other than suck.  I hate him as an actor, and would prefer his movies to not exist than him to be allowed and paid to make more movies.

Not one line is said without an odd, off kilter tone somewhere in it.

 

            In my opinion, this is one of the worst movies I have ever scene, and Keanu is one of the worst actors I have ever watched.  Have you seen the trailer for "The Day the Earth Stood Still"?

I will never watch this peice of shit.