The Lawnmower Man (1992): Almost a Cult Classic

Terminator crossed with RoboCop

There’s a certain fascination with watching a movie that thought it was peering into the future but ended up stuck in the past. The Lawnmower Man (1992), directed by Brett Leonard and released through New Line Cinema, is a strange cocktail of Stephen King’s name, early-90s computer graphics, and a script more interested in clichés than characters. It was promoted as visionary science fiction but now plays more like a time capsule of where Hollywood thought technology and psychology might merge. What remains compelling isn’t what it gets right, but the way it misses so spectacularly.

It opens with a monkey in a VR headset that looks like he was an early experiment from RoboCop. It’s hard not to laugh, not because it’s meant to be funny, but because the image is so absurd. The effect is unsettling but unintentional, and somehow, that becomes the defining mood of the whole movie: earnest ambition tripping over its own awkwardness.

Dr. Angelo and His Bookshelf of Foreshadowing

Pierce Brosnan plays Dr Lawrence Angelo, a scientist caught between his conscience and the demands of his employers at Virtual Space Industries (VSI). His introduction is surprisingly literary. He’s framed by a stack of books that serve as a cheat sheet for the themes the film wants to tackle: Dr. Strangelove (war and absurd destruction), The Ascent of Man (humanity’s evolutionary climb), The Science of the Mind (psychology and perception), Science Fiction Films (self-awareness of the genre), and People Like Us (the social lens of how humans treat one another). These titles aren’t subtle background dressing—they’re billboards telling the audience what to expect. The problem is that the movie never digs into those ideas with any depth. Instead, they become props hinting at a bigger story that the script isn’t prepared to tell.

Angelo himself is painted with broad strokes. He’s the classic well-meaning scientist archetype: intelligent, troubled, and torn between morality and ambition. We’ve seen this character dozens of times in Cold War and post-Cold War thrillers—the man who plays with forces bigger than himself because he believes he can control them. He’s sympathetic, but he’s also written flatly, without nuance beyond his professional obsession and his failing marriage. It’s as if the movie expects Brosnan’s charisma alone to carry the weight.

Enter Jobe

Then comes Jobe, played by Jeff Fahey. His first appearance feels imported from another movie entirely—like a Hobbit emerging from his hole in some rural fantasy. The camera lingers on him as if he’s meant to be childlike and innocent, though the framing only makes the tonal clash stronger. Jobe is a simple gardener, naïve but eager to please, and his life is defined by the people around him. His employer, Terry McKeen, is written as a stereotypical Irishman with a hip flask, yet he treats Jobe with rough-edged loyalty and ensures he always has work. Terry is one of the few characters who genuinely cares about Jobe, making his presence an important counterpoint.

This makes the contrast with the rest of Jobe’s environment sharper. While Terry provides a thread of decency, everyone else seems designed to keep Jobe down. That imbalance (one ally in a world of oppressors) sets up his vulnerability and primes his later transformation into something powerful, inevitable, and tragic.

Stock Characters, Stock Plot

Every supporting figure is built from a stereotype, and the film leans heavily on shorthand. Angelo’s wife, Caroline, is the dismissive spouse who refuses to understand her husband’s work, a role written with no sympathy or complexity. Father Francis McKeen, the local priest, embodies hypocrisy: preaching God’s lessons with one hand and striking Jobe with the other. He keeps Jobe uneducated, stripping away books and independence, ensuring his docility. At one point, Jobe even says he wants to cash his checks and buy new clothes, a line that sounds like he’s confronting the priest over wages “looked after” but never returned. It’s a small moment, but it exposes the priest’s greedy control.

The other antagonists form a gauntlet of cruelty. Jake, the town bully, is little more than a cartoon antagonist, whose only function is to sneer, torment, and eventually receive his comeuppance. The violent father next door directs his abuse at his wife and child, and Jobe’s eventual “correction” of him is framed as revenge but plays like a parody. And looming over them all is VSI, the faceless corporate villain that operates from shadowy labs and conveniently supplies the tools of Jobe’s transformation. The one exception is Terry McKeen, a stereotype himself, who is drawn with warmth and flawed loyalty. Placed against the priest’s cruelty and VSI’s exploitation, Terry becomes a foil that shows not every influence in Jobe’s life is cruel. Grouped together, these characters represent family, community, and corporate forces, but all painted with the broadest strokes.

Cornball Tech

someone move the mouse

What most people remember about The Lawnmower Man isn’t its characters or story, but its laughably dated vision of virtual reality. The graphics were primitive even by early-90s standards. Instead of immersing the audience in wonder or dread, the film delivers neon tunnels, spinning shapes, and amorphous blobs that resemble rejected screensavers. The infamous tumble rig, a circular harness clearly modelled on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, was intended to symbolise the union of technology and humanity. On screen, though, it feels closer to a carnival ride.

The movie presents “mind programming” as if learning, memory, and evolution can be compressed into colourful visuals. Complex concepts like intelligence amplification or neurological growth are translated into simplistic montages of Jobe floating through polygons. It’s corny and reductive, and yet, three decades later, there’s a charm to it. It captures the cultural optimism and fear of the early VR wave, when computers seemed capable of anything and Hollywood believed digital reality could both elevate and destroy us. Ironically, if the effects had been layered the way Blade Runner (1982) handled its city fly-ins, using physical models with CGI overlays, the result might have aged far better and likely cost less. Instead, the film went all-in on primitive computer animation that now looks more like a 1960s Doctor Who episode than a futuristic vision. (No slight to Doctor Who—the Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee eras are my favourite—but the comparison shows just how quickly pure CGI can age.)

Pacing Problems

The structure of the film is one of its biggest flaws. For all its ambition, it refuses to move quickly. Thirty-two minutes pass before Angelo even entertains the idea of continuing his experiments off the books, and thirty-nine before he finally commits to going rogue. That’s over a quarter of the movie spent meandering through exposition and melodrama before the plot kicks in. At almost the halfway mark, Jobe suffers his first mental breakdown; a moment that should feel pivotal, but instead drags because of the endless setup.

The (Director's cut) runtime stretches over two hours, and much of it is filled with repetition: Jobe being mocked, Jobe being punished, Angelo clashing with VSI, and Caroline dismissing her husband. It feels padded, as though the writers weren’t confident in moving the story forward without replaying the same beats. By the time Jobe reaches godlike power, the audience is exhausted rather than exhilarated. Compared to Lucy (2014), which leaned into its premise and escalated quickly, The Lawnmower Man plods along, dragging out scenes far past their natural endpoint. Combined with the clunky CGI, the pacing problems double down, leaving the film both slow and shallow.

Religious Overtones

The film wears its biblical symbolism on its sleeve. Jobe’s arc is a techno-parable framed as a journey to godhood. “I saw God, I touched God,” he declares mid-transformation, foreshadowing his eventual self-proclamation as God. Crosses appear not as background imagery but as literal weapons; Angelo is trapped in cyberspace by a crucifix-shaped construct, hammered into place by CGI. The metaphor isn’t subtle; it’s shouted at the audience.

Even the names point directly to religious allegory. Jobe recalls Job, the biblical figure tested through endless suffering. Angelo, meaning “angel,” is cast as both messenger and reluctant saviour. Peter, Jobe’s young friend, takes his name from one of Christ’s apostles, symbolising innocence and loyalty. Father McKeen plays the role of false shepherd, abusing his flock while hiding behind scripture and exploiting Jobe’s earnings. Together, they form a symbolic chorus that leaves no room for interpretation. The film wants us to see Jobe not as a man but as a figure ascending—or perhaps falling—through the hierarchy of faith and power. Any chance of subtlety is buried under the weight of these choices.

Plot Holes and Odd Choices

The inconsistencies pile up as the story progresses. Jobe and Marnie stroll into a high-security VSI lab with shocking ease, despite the supposedly tight controls. Marnie’s mind is fried by the experiments, but the film lingers barely a moment before moving on, as if her fate is inconsequential. Angelo’s access to the system is revoked at one point, yet later he logs in without explanation. Was he the one hacking in? Did the writers forget? The pieces are there to suggest an answer, but the movie brushes past it once Jobe is inside the mainframe.

Then there’s the revenge spree. Jobe stands next to his lawnmower, illuminated by a simple backlight and fog, mowing down those who have hurt him or others. The image is absurd, leaning into parody rather than horror. The violent father’s “correction” is one such moment—a scene that could have been chilling but instead feels like a grim joke. By the climax, when Jobe declares himself God, the film has already undercut its own seriousness with these tonal shifts. What should have been the emotional core of the story barely registers.

How to Fix It

The Lawnmower Man had potential—it just needed sharper focus and better structure. The pacing should have been tightened so that Angelo’s decision to go rogue arrives within the first fifteen minutes, and Jobe’s transformation begins before the first act closes. The bullies and antagonists could have been integrated more naturally, appearing in parallel with Angelo’s struggles at VSI instead of showing up in repetitive, isolated beats. This would create momentum and emphasise the idea that both Angelo and Jobe are under pressure from all directions.

The characters needed depth beyond stereotype. Father McKeen could have been more than a caricature of religious cruelty—he could have been written as sincerely believing he was protecting Jobe by keeping him ignorant, adding moral ambiguity. Caroline could have been sympathetic, torn between fear for her husband and exhaustion with his obsession, rather than a one-note nag. Jake and the violent father could have represented systemic cycles of violence, not just cheap villains waiting to be punished.

The VR sequences needed grounding in psychological horror rather than simplistic spectacle. Imagine if Jobe’s “mindscapes” were filled with fractured memories, distorted versions of his abusers, and glimpses of a dissolving self. That would be terrifying, and it would tie his transformation directly to his trauma. Just as importantly, the visuals themselves needed a different approach. If the film had borrowed from the Blade Runner playbook, using layered model work with CGI overlays instead of relying solely on primitive computer animation, the imagery might have aged with far more grace, while also lending it a tactile quality to ground the psychological horror.

And the ending needed conviction. Jobe outright declares he has a billion phone calls to make, and the film underlines it by showing phones across the world, from Angelo’s home line to phones in London ringing in unison. There’s no ambiguity: he escaped into the network.

Facial features as expressive as a text message

What the film needed was not clarity of outcome, but emotional weight to match it. That could have come from giving Peter more screen time as the anchor of Jobe’s humanity, or showing Angelo’s horror and grief more directly as he realises his creation has escaped into the world. Building that connection would have made the final moments resonate rather than fizzle. Tying it back to the religious overtones, Peter could have symbolised innocence worth saving—Jobe’s last tether to humanity, with his release of Angelo framed not just as a plot function but as the one truly redemptive act that gives his final moments greater weight. This is where the film’s attempted redemption arc falters—the voice modulation muffles Jobe’s crucial line, “I don’t want any more death…,” burying what should have been the heart of his humanity under sound design missteps. Combined with the CGI that wasn’t even Uncanny Valley bad, just failed to convey any facial emotion, the attempt at redemption is completely undercut. Meanwhile, Angelo’s reaction could have echoed the despair of a failed angel watching a false god ascend.

Handled with more care, The Lawnmower Man could have been more than a curiosity. It could have been the defining early-90s meditation on VR, religion, and the fragility of power. Instead, it’s remembered as a digital relic—a film that mowed down its own potential but still left us with one hell of a weird artifact. The finale even echoes Electric Dreams (1984), where consciousness uploads into the machine and “lives on” digitally, though here, it plays out with less charm and a lot more CGI sludge.

Legacy: Almost a Cult Classic

The Lawnmower Man had Stephen King’s name, Pierce Brosnan in his pre-Bond years, and a premise that screamed cult potential. However, it was overshadowed by corny VR effects, sluggish pacing, and characters who felt more like stock cutouts than genuine individuals. It could have been the early-90s VR movie, the one still referenced alongside The Matrix. Instead, it became a relic, remembered mostly for its oddities: a monkey in a headset, a priest with a belt, and a lawnmower turned into a weapon of vengeance.

And yet, it’s not a lost cause. Looking back now, the film reads like a rough draft of anxieties about virtual reality, religious allegory, and corporate overreach. With tighter pacing, layered visuals, and a stronger emotional core, it could have stood as a defining work of early-90s sci-fi. It’s unlikely ever to be remade in its current form, given its dated depictions and heavy-handed representation.

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 time travel: TimeCop (1994). If any film screamed “almost,” it was that one.