Starring:
Keanu Reeves
Ice-T
"Beat" Takeshi
Dolph Lundgren
Plot Summary: Can Ice-T keep Keanu's brain from melting in this dystopian sci-fi thriller?
It is the second decade of the 21st Century. Any movie that starts out like that, well, you know it's not going to be a musical. Most of the scenery will be futuristic, and by futuristic I mean dark grey. There will be very little sunlight and very little good news. Sure enough, we open on a world where bio-mechanical implants augment human strength, speed, and intelligence, but also cause a disease known as Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS) to run rampant throughout the globe, not to mention completely ruining the Olympics. Corporations like the drug-maker PharmaCom have aligned with the yakuza crime syndicates as part of a massive paradigm shift towards more killing of people, and are locked in constant battle with a vigilante movement known as the LoTeks, essentially modern-day Luddites in hipper outfits.
And in this futuristic dystopia, Keanu Reeves is Johnny, a mnemonic courier that smuggles data in his brain implant. Just a simple boy from the big city, Keanu travels the globe, staying in luxurious suites at five-star hotels with expensive champagne and even more expensive hookers as he tries to scrape together enough money to afford an operation to remove the implant, recover his memories, and get out of the harsh, unforgiving business. His reptilian agent Ralphie (pardon me, Ralfi, and I'm sure there's an accent or an umlaut or something) offers him one last job that could get him out of those penthouses for good and back to the farm, or something.
Despite the fact that Rälfí speaks with a thick German accent and in such a hoarse whisper that he can't possibly not be evil, Keanu trusts him. He leaves his Beijing hotel and wades through a throng of Chinese protesters, all wearing white dust masks. Apparently, even in a futuristic dystopia, Asians are still hypochondriacs.
To max out his storage capacity at 160 GB, Keanu transfers his childhood memories and three-quarters of his personality to some kind of futuristic Zip drive. Personally, I would have erased all memory of puberty instead, but perhaps Keanu didn't have awkward years. Damn good-looking bastard.
We meet Keanu's clients, a bunch of geeky former PharmaCom researchers who immediately start warning him that they have 320 GB of data and if he doesn't have sufficient capacity he will suffer synaptic seepage as the data overloads his neurons, resulting in death within 48 hours. Keanu, clearly overwhelmed by all the talk of neural physiology and numbers that are bigger than other numbers, brushes the nerds off and prepares the data transfer.
Keanu uploads the sensitive data from the 3-inch optical disc into his brain. This form of transport is necessary because apparently due to a Great Disaster in the Past, the technology of pockets and briefcases were lost forever. It also seems to be impossible for Keanu to duct-tape the CD to his ass, but the creative element behind the film refrains from overtelling the story.
As is often the case, before the geeks can fax the encryption code to the delivery point, the PharmaCom yakuza attack. Along with the usual large, martial-arts-proficient, gun-toting men, the crew is headed by the one known as Shinji. Shinji is armed with the traditional "glowing red wire of death," a whip made out of plasma or evil or something that he pulls out of an artificial thumb and can cut just through just about any material known to man. He is a grandmaster of this weapon, meaning he can use it without slicing his own arm off. The yakuza dispatch the nerds with deceptive efficiency, since they allow Keanu, the real target, to fight them off armed with nothing but a towel rod from the bathroom.
Meanwhile the yakuza president of PharmaCom, Takahashi, tries to determine what to do about this breach of security, or more precisely, who should sever, freeze, and return Keanu's head for data recovery. Played by Beat Takeshi, (known for his stylized-violence Japanese epics including Violent Cop and Violent Topiary Gardener) he can even look menacing when sitting cross-legged on a desk talking into a videophone. He does this while hiring the assassin known as the Street Preacher, played by Dolph Lundgren, the thinking man's Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has the spirituality of Pat Robertson, the brawn of Dolph Lundgren, and the violent psychosis of Pat Robertson.
Keanu is able to evade his yakuza killers and make it to the drop-off point in the urban wasteland that is Newark, New Jersey. This goes to show that even in a futuristic dystopia, Jersey jokes are still gold. However, Keanu is in a bad position. Not only is he on the run with a potentially fatal overdose of raw data in his head without the encryption code needed to extract it, he is consumed by a need to try to negotiate with the corporate gangsters that are trying to kill him. About the only thing that could help would be to find a hot female bodyguard, preferably one wearing nothing but black tights and a chain mail shirt.
Enter Jane, played by Dina Meyer, better known as the actress in Starship Troopers that agreed to the nude scenes. She finds Keanu right after he is recaptured by Shinji, and in exchange for ten grand, agrees to save his life and develop sexual tension. Once safe, Jane promptly suffers a seizure - the dreaded Black Shakes, which is "street" for NAS. So Keanu hauls her twitching, yet somehow still a little alluring, body to her "doctor," a man named Spider.
Dr. Spider, played by punk rocker, music producer, and ranting machine Henry Rollins, occupies a warehouse that looks a lot like Dr. Frankenstein's lab except dirtier. He starts to treat Jane but decides to first explode into a freestyle rant in Keanu's general direction about how the Black Shakes are not actually caused by the myriad bio-electronic implants in people, but by information overload from too much technology, possibly orchestrated by The Man. And if anyone is going to know the secret cause of NAS, it's some guy named Spider. Keanu is understandably confused, since he never expected the global epidemic of the century to be the result of CNN and FoxNews and their damned tickers.
After taking a look at Keanu's condition, Dr. Spider decides to drive him to a hospital in his Mad Max issue garbage truck. At Newark's Our Lady of Festering Decay, Dr. Spider is a respected surgeon, inasmuch as he gets to wear a white labcoat and carry around a clipboard. He then reveals the contents of Johnny's data: a cure for NAS. All the medical underground has been able to come up with is how to merely treat the symptoms. Well, that or not implanting shit inside their brains in the first place, but a cure would be a lot more convenient. And if Keanu would just submit to a routine power-tool lobotomy, then the world would have that cure.
This movie presents one of the classic scruples questions: would you save humanity if it meant having Henry Rollins perform brain surgery on you with a hacksaw and a melon baller? In one of Keanu's less heroic moments, he declines, not wanting to risk his emotional range or ability to enunciate. Before they can discuss alternatives, Dolph plows onto the screen. Dr. Spider tells Jane and Keanu to run to J-Bone and talk to Jones, while he holds off Dolph, and by hold off I mean get brutally beaten and tortured by.
Keanu and Jane seek out J-Bone, but not before Keanu tries once again to negotiate with PharmaCom. Keanu is not one to hold multiple assassination attempts against someone, and perhaps I'm just a jaded old film critic, but I find that refreshing. It's also all too easy to understand, as Keanu realizes this is about the only way he and Takeshi will be able to do a scene together. So Keanu tells the yakuza drug-makers to meet him at the LoTek Secret Headquarters, giving them directions and some tips on how best to assault the compound.
There is a slight delay at the LoTek Secret Headquarters when due to a cultural misunderstanding, the LoTeks drop a flaming Volkswagen bug on Dr. Spider's garbage truck, a typical example of futuristic Jersey humor. Keanu then is greeted by J-Bone, played by the beyond-hip Ice-T. He sports a frizzy 80s layered look not seen since Lea Thompson in the 1986 epic Howard the Duck, and yet still looks like a badass. Remarkable.
Despite calling Keanu a "suit" in the same tone of voice that he would use for "honkey," Ice-T seems to take quite a shine to Keanu, in that he doesn't kill him. He even takes Keanu over to meet Jones, the Six Million Dollar Dolphin. Surgically enhanced, from the looks of it with a chainsaw, and trained to hack enemy computers through submarine hulls, Jones offers to hack Keanu's brain to retrieve the cure for NAS with a much lower chance of the lobotomy side-effect. Spotting an obvious upgrade from Henry Rollins, Keanu goes with the dolphin.
It is at this inopportune moment that the yakuza decide to attack the LoTek Secret Headquarters with bazookas and automatic rifles. The LoTeks are armed with crossbows. Incidentally, this is also why the yakuza work in pristine high-rises and the LoTeks live underneath a bridge on the outskirts of Newark. The brain hack is interrupted because everyone in the movie shows up to kill Keanu. Even people who wanted to kill Keanu in other movies show up. First Shinji comes after Keanu with his glowing red wire of death, then Dolph rumbles in, presumably after torturing Dr. Spider into revealing where Keanu was going, and then torturing pedestrians in Newark for directions. Keanu is able to dispatch them in sufficiently ironic fashion, and then confronts Takeshi.
Now, some directors would be concerned about working with an actor like Takeshi, whose English is not so good. Luckily, Takeshi has Keanu to lean on. Their long-awaited scene begins with a standoff where Takeshi takes a few slashes at Keanu with his katana, but his heart clearly isn't in it. Takeshi hands over the encryption code, as he and Keanu communicate their mutual weariness and desire for a peaceful resolution using surprisingly little dialogue.
The encryption code is not quite complete, meaning Keanu must still hack his brain. This is incredibly difficult, as the data is chock full of viruses, and more importantly, because computer hacking sequences are notoriously difficult to film in an entertaining manner. Incidentally, this is why hacking was combined with oral sex in the 2001 opus Swordfish. Director Robert Longo flexes his directing muscles when he renders the hacking sequence in state-of-the-art computer graphics, where Keanu transforms himself into the Slim Jim guy in order to confuse the viruses, portrayed by laser cannons from a Nintendo game. Keanu is able to break the encryption (which was apparently based on the first level of Contra), releasing the cure for NAS and giving the world the best animated self-brain-hacking sequence in movie history. Ice-T immediately begins broadcasting the 320 GB of data on all channels satisfied that someone, somewhere out there is TiVo-ing it.
Thus having made the futuristic dystopia safe for love, freedom, and bio-mechanical manipulations that are an affront to god and man, Keanu falls into the arms of Jane as an approving Ice-T looks on. I would have to say that this is the greatest movie I have ever seen.
