This film did not end up being as interesting as I’d hoped it would be. I had heard about it many years ago and always intended to watch it, even recording it off TV, but just never got around to it. I finally decided to bite the bullet and review it for this blog, and oh wow, was it something else. Instead of getting an interesting and engaging mid-90s cyberpunk film, I got a hokey, overdone, and clever-clever mid-90s cyberpunk film. Before we get into the meat of what I mean by all this, let’s take a look at the plot.
The film follows Lenny, a cop-turned-dealer who, instead of pushing narcotics, pushes virtual reality. Basically, in the future world the plot is set in, there are VR devices that run off prerecorded footage shot from a first-person perspective, and a neural device is used to simulate the experience of being the person that the film is created from. Lenny’s life has all but gone down the tubes, with him becoming little more than a sleazy, ratty conman, much to the chagrin of Mace, a limo driver who knew Lenny when he was a cop and remembers how caring and responsible he used to be. Lenny takes Mace’s care and concern for granted while pining after his ex-girlfriend Faith, a strung-out junkie who’s currently seeing hip music manager Philo Gant. Philo had recently been managing the now deceased activist-rapper Jeriko One, whose death has resulted in various acts of rioting and unrest (not unlike the Rodney King beating which had occurred only a few years earlier). One night, an old friend of Faith’s named Iris is being chased by the cops and tries to get in contact with Lenny but is unsuccessful. She does manage to put a VR disc in Lenny’s car, which is later impounded, forcing him to ride in Mace’s limo in order to cut a deal with a client. While at a nightclub where Faith is performing in a band, and while trying to reconnect with her, Lenny gets another VR disc from a connected source. He watches this disc in the limo on the drive back, and it turns out to be a recording from the perspective of a masked man breaking into Iris’s apartment, raping and killing her. He takes the disc to his supplier to try and figure out where this recording came from, but to no avail. They do manage to figure out that Iris might have put something in Lenny’s car, so he and Mace go to the impound lot to find it. Upon recovering the disc, they are attacked by the two cops that were pursuing Iris, resulting in a near-death escape for Lenny and Mace. Lenny later watches the disc, and forces Mace to do so as well, and it’s revealed to be a recording from Iris’s point-of-view of Jeriko One being pulled over and executed by the two cops from earlier. What follows is a twisty-turny thriller story wherein Lenny tries to get to the bottom of all this with the help of Mace as well as his old investigator buddy Max.
This movie seems to have a problem of overdoing its execution and overestimating its cleverness. The characters often speak in these sorts of “fortune-cookie”-esque sentences (a term coined by the person I watched the film with) that try to sound deep or resonant but often come across as too clean and shallow. It feels like a bad case of 90s-brand hip “we know what’s really going on” sort of writing, coming across as more pretentious than meaningful. The film seems to be trying to back up this sort of “awareness” with an attempt at a dense and weaving plot that hints at internal corruption and conspiracy, as well as commenting on relatively current events to emphasize this element. Now granted, its commentary on police corruption and profiled violence towards African Americans is still a relevant notion to this day, what with the recent George Floyd incident, so I will note that aspect as being potent. However, this doesn’t ultimately redeem the overall experience of the film, which is way too overblown to take entirely seriously. The drama in the film is played up to groan-worthy levels of melodrama and intensity, such as a scene where a character is being kicked on the ground by riot police in a semi-slow motion shot as it cuts between them and the police, which doesn’t really portray the visceral brutality of that sort of situation, coming across more like a daytime TV drama than anything. There’s also a scene where a character, covered in blood from their now dead friend, aggressively runs after another character before getting gunned down. The blood effects smeared on the character’s face look laughably silly and coupled with the slow-motion makes the whole scene come across like something out of a lame horror movie. In addition to all of this, the film seems to be going for a faux-cyberpunk sort of aesthetic, what with the use of virtual reality and a dystopian future. However, for the most part, it comes across like they just took L.A., slapped some semi-neon lighting on it (and we’re talking mid-90s neon lighting too), added a few “cyber” effects in there, and called it cyberpunk. It probably doesn’t help that by the time this film came out, the cyberpunk movement was becoming over-saturated and wasn’t as big as it was a few years ago (not to say that new works weren’t being made, it’s just that the impact of it was waning, or at least that’s the impression I’ve gotten). I would say it’s still better than some of its contemporaries, such as Johnny Mnemonic and The Lawnmower Man, but that’s not a hugely high bar to begin with. Overall, the film just felt very forced. It wasn’t played up in a way that was either fun or engaging, it just felt like a lower-grade attempt at crafting a thriller, while adding some cool techno flourishes for extra “cool geek” points.
I’m sad to say I didn’t really enjoy my time with this film. However, if you’re a big fan of cyberpunk, this sort of hip 90s writing resonates with you, or if you enjoy really played up works of fiction, then you might have a more enjoyable time with this. Granted, I wouldn’t recommend you seeing this as your first cyberpunk-esque work necessarily, but maybe check it out when you’ve gone through some of the larger classics. Strange Days has found us indeed.