Keanu Reeves is everywhere these days, but long before The Matrix turned him into a cyberpunk icon, he starred in Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Based on William Gibson’s short story, it should have been the definitive 90s cyberpunk film. Instead, it became a curiosity—half remembered for its dolphin hacker, half mocked for its clunky dialogue and cheap sets. Yet beneath the awkward delivery and polygonal VR graphics lies a story that almost worked. The potential is there, visible through the cracks, but it needed a steadier hand to pull it into focus.

This is where we step in. Welcome to Almost a Cult Classic, where we ask: how could this film have been saved?

Worldbuilding: Too Dirty, Too Cheap

neat piles of rubbish — neatly stacked rubbish - keeping the neighborhood clean

Cyberpunk thrives on contrast—grit colliding with neon, humanity struggling against technology, excess piled on decay, and corporations that we love to hate. Blade Runner nailed this balance. Its streets weren’t just dirty, they were suffocating. Mountains of garbage bags sprawled into the alleys, neon signs cut through the haze, a corporation sitting in the grey zone of ethics—every corner felt alive with threat and possibility. Johnny Mnemonic tried to channel the same atmosphere but fell short. Instead of claustrophobic urban density, we get bare warehouses and piles of metal scraps that look carelessly dumped by a props department. The world doesn’t feel lived in; it feels fake; it feels like a stage.

The film’s cyberspace fares no better. At the time, the visuals were marketed as a futuristic spectacle. Today, they look cartoonish—floating polygons, avatars ripped from a 16-bit demo reel, and computer effects so garish they collapse the noir tone. The problem isn’t only that they aged poorly; it’s that they never matched the story’s intended seriousness. Hackers could get away with neon rave aesthetics because it embraced camp. The Lawnmower Man committed to surreal CGI because VR was its central subject. Johnny Mnemonic tried to be a hard-edged cyberpunk noir while leaning on visuals that undercut its own mood.

Characters: The Right Cast, the Wrong Material

The cast should have made this film a cult classic. Reeves, Meyer, Ice-T, Lundgren, Rollins—each actor brought a unique presence, but the material they were handed flattened them into caricatures.

Keanu Reeves as Johnny

Johnny meeting the customer for the first time — Johnny catching up with some friends

Keanu Reeves, still before his breakout in The Matrix, plays Johnny with the stiffness of a blank slate. He’s supposed to embody tragedy—a man who sold his memories for storage capacity—but we never feel the loss. The idea that a courier traded away his own childhood should be haunting, yet the script never gives Reeves the chance to explore it. Instead of glimpses of pain or confusion, Johnny moves from scene to scene with little emotional weight, as if the trade cost him nothing. Imagine if the film had given him fragmented flashbacks of a childhood he can’t place, or moments of raw frustration where he lashes out because he knows he is missing pieces of himself. Even a single quiet beat of a photograph he can’t remember being in, a lullaby that sparks no recognition, would have grounded the tragedy in something tangible. Without these moments, Reeves is left delivering stiff lines in an emotional vacuum, and the character’s deepest wound never makes it to the screen.

Dina Meyer as Jane

Dina Meyer shines as Jane, hinting at the charisma she would later display in Starship Troopers. But she’s relegated to muscle-for-hire when she could have been the film’s emotional anchor. The script gives her Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS), yet it rarely shows the toll—just a passing mention, one scene with Ralfi and his bodyguards and the low point where she collapses. Imagine if the film had leaned harder into her illness: trembling hands during a firefight, her body betraying her resolve, or a moment where Johnny sees her collapse and realises the stakes are personal for her too. Jane could have embodied the desperation of ordinary people fighting NAS, grounding the story’s stakes in flesh and blood. Giving her a sibling or close friend dying of the disease would have deepened her drive, transforming her from generic muscle into a co-lead with her own urgent arc. Instead, her character hovers at the edges, hinting at more than the script is willing to give.

Supporting Cast

Spider ranting about technology problem giving people NAS — Dr Info-Dump telling us exposition

Ice-T as J-Bone is charismatic, but his dialogue feels pasted in from another script, full of slogans instead of substance. Instead of being a true leader of the LoTeks, he comes across as a man with a few soundbites, never the strategist or revolutionary the film needed. A stronger script could have made him the voice of the oppressed, someone who articulated the cost of corporate greed and rallied people with more than a quip.

Dolph Lundgren’s cybernetic preacher assassin is memorable in a surreal way but impossible to take seriously; he tips into parody every time he appears. The concept of a faith-driven hitman could have been terrifying—a man who believes killing for Pharmakom is God’s will, but here it’s a cartoon. Dialling back the theatrics and giving him quieter menace, maybe scenes where he manipulates victims with scripture before striking, would have made him chilling rather than laughable.

Henry Rollins as Spider might have been the most compelling character; the punk doctor with real stakes in the struggle, but he’s trapped delivering exposition before being dispatched. Spider should have embodied the underground resistance of medicine against corporate stranglehold. There is one scene around the one-hour mark where we glimpse a clinic treating the NAS-affected, but it quickly slips into more telling instead of showing. If that moment had lingered on suffering patients and Spider’s desperation trying to treat seizures with crude tools, fighting with limited resources, the audience would have felt his fight against Pharmakom. Such a scene would have deepened his character and made his eventual death hit far harder.

And then there’s Jones, the dolphin. In Gibson’s world, a signal-addicted military dolphin is a perfect cyberpunk tragedy. On screen, it plays like a bizarre gimmick, eliciting chuckles instead of dread. If the film had leaned into his scars, his dependency on signals, and the sense that he was once a proud military experiment now discarded, Jones could have been unforgettable. His final act of helping Johnny decode the cure could have played as sacrifice instead of spectacle.

Plot Execution: Rushed and Clunky

The pacing stumbles at nearly every turn. The film stops dead for exposition, then rushes through moments that should land with weight. Johnny’s implant limits are explained twice. Pharmakom defectors deliver monologues that never pay off. Spider rattles off NAS details like a lecture instead of letting the audience experience its cost. Scenes that should terrify instead feel flat.

When the action arrives, it undercuts itself. The infamous motion sensor fight, where armed guards simply sit and wait for death, is the kind of misstep that drains tension. Tonally, the film shifts like a broken switchboard. One scene goes for slapstick—an enemy soldier flattened by a falling car; the next plunges into (mild) horror, with the Preacher killing Spider in gruesome fashion. Boardroom intrigues play like a corporate thriller, while the LoTek hideout veers toward Mad Max territory. None of it connects, and by the time we reach the rushed climax with Pharmakom headquarters engulfed in flames, the AI version of the CEO, Ice-T tossing off a one-liner, it feels like chunks of the story were left on the cutting room floor.

Pharmakom vs. the Yakuza

Another structural weakness is how the film frames its threats. Pharmakom, the corporation at the heart of the story, isn’t written as an active antagonist. Instead, it’s the Yakuza who dominate the screen as Johnny’s pursuers and visible danger. This leaves Pharmakom feeling like background noise—an idea rather than a presence—while the syndicate fills the role of villain. The result is a muddled focus: audiences are asked to fear shadowy gangsters when the more interesting story should have centred on corporate power and control. By failing to make Pharmakom a direct adversary, the film undercuts its own themes of dystopian capitalism and turns Johnny’s struggle into a chase movie rather than a battle against systemic corruption.

Missed Opportunities

The meta-miss. Decades later, Keanu Reeves would play Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077—a literal engram, a digital ghost inside someone else’s head. That role resonates because it explores identity reduced to data, a self overwritten by corporate design. Johnny Mnemonic had the same seed but ignored it. Imagine if Johnny had suffered glitch flashes of stolen memories, or if the cure itself began leaking into his brain, slowly overwriting fragments of his youth and changing who he was. The very act of carrying it would become corrosive, a ticking clock not only to death but to the erasure of self. He would want desperately to stop that from happening, to preserve whatever pieces of his past remained. It could have shifted the film from chase-thriller to meditation on the cost of becoming data itself, anticipating themes that would define cyberpunk for years.

The courier story that should have been. The premise is dynamite: a courier carrying the cure for a global disease inside his head, the clock ticking before it kills him. That’s noir gold. The film should have leaned into paranoia, relentless pursuit, and moral compromise. Instead, it wandered into disjointed action sequences. Done right, every beat should have ratcheted up pressure until Johnny faced an impossible choice.

Corporate dystopia with teeth. Pharmakom barely registers as an antagonist until late in the film. But it should have been a towering presence from frame one, as insidious and omnipresent as OCP in Robocop or Weyland-Yutani in Aliens. News clips, propaganda, lawsuits, covert assassins—the works. Give the CEO a calm, smiling menace, and the showdown at the end suddenly has weight.

Make NAS personal and visible. The disease, supposedly devastating humanity, is only described. What if we saw crowded street wards, children shaking as everyday tech triggered seizures, families forced to watch loved ones deteriorate? Suddenly, the cure in Johnny’s head is no longer abstract. It’s urgent, emotional, unavoidable, and Johnny’s choice is no longer distant—it’s personal, and impossible to ignore.

How to Fix It

The foundation is solid. With sharper writing and a focus on character stakes, Johnny Mnemonic could have stood as a genuine cyberpunk classic. Here’s how.

Johnny as a Noir Hero. His implant wasn’t just a transaction; it cost him his identity. Every scene should remind us that he traded himself away. In the end, his arc should hinge on whether he clings to those last fragments or sacrifices them for the greater good.

Jane with Purpose. Make Jane more than a sidekick. Tie her directly to NAS: a sibling, partner, or close friend dying from the disease. Her motivation becomes urgent and personal. She’s not just Johnny’s ally; she’s fighting for her own world.

Pharmakom as the Looming Villain. Seed the CEO early. Let her presence linger through corporate media clips and quiet manipulations. By the time Johnny confronts her, the audience knows exactly what she represents: profit over life, control over freedom. This sort of detail comes across in Robocop (1987), Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997).

Show the Disease. A ten-second scene in a clinic, patients twitching under neon lights, would add more urgency than pages of dialogue. Seeing suffering firsthand makes the cure in Johnny’s head a moral obligation, not a plot MacGuffin.

Reframe the Dolphin. Jones is not comic relief. He’s a scarred veteran, weaponised and abandoned. Show his scars, his addiction to signals, his slow deterioration. His decision to help Johnny should feel like his final act of rebellion, an animal reclaiming agency at a cost. His convulsions during the climax should sting.

A Climax with Consequence. Instead of fire and chaos, give us choice. Johnny must release the cure, but doing so erases the last of his own past. It’s tragic, poetic, and fitting. He saves the world at the cost of himself—a cyberpunk ending through and through. This ending doesn’t need to burn Pharmakon down if they were portrayed correctly from the start. Simply releasing the cure should bring down the evil corporation.

Legacy: Almost a Cult Classic

Johnny Mnemonic had William Gibson’s name, Keanu Reeves in his early rise, and a premise that screamed cult potential. But it drowned under clunky exposition, tonal confusion, and production that looked cheaper than its ideas deserved. It could have been the '90s cyberpunk movie, the one we’d still reference alongside The Matrix. Instead, it became a relic, remembered mostly for its oddities: a preacher assassin, a dolphin hacker, and dialogue that landed with a thud.

And yet, it’s not a lost cause. Looking back now, the film reads like a rough draft of what Reeves would later embody in The Matrix and even in Cyberpunk 2077. With tighter writing, stronger stakes, and an ending that forced Johnny to choose between self and society, Johnny Mnemonic could have been more than a curiosity. It could have stood as a defining work of cyberpunk cinema in the 90s.

That’s what makes it perfect for Almost a Cult Classic: a film perched on the edge of greatness, one rewrite away from legendary.

Next time, we might talk about another VR relic: The Lawnmower Man. If any film screamed “almost,” it was that one.

Johnny Mnemonic (1995): Almost a Cult Classic