Johnny Mnemonic. Ye gods, that is not a good film. Fun in parts, but not good.
I must have caught the last five or so minutes of it on TV once, because I knew it ended with a fake-out. I knew the handful of iconic images: Keanu Reeves as Johnny with a bloody great techno-helmet on his head, the perpetual literal-minded psychogeographic stupidity of Gibsonian cyberspace, Ice-T. And of course that it's loosely based on Gibson's short of the same name.
I'm truthfully not sure they did either thing any favours, with that "loosely based".
There are some early parts which nearly hit some kind of true-to-Gibson ambience, I think — but all the factions involved in the derring-do have all the depth of a TTRPG setting book boxout, and nearly all the dialogue has the depth, nuance and specificity of a computer RPG generic NPC bark. Although to be fair to generic NPC barks, you sometimes get great VA delivery on them, which you ain't gonna get here!
The plot is nonsense. It's authentically second-rate-cyberpunk nonsense, I guess I'll give it that. A maguffin plague, a maguffin encypted data payload, a maguffin AI, a bunch of assorted murderers. Classic cyberpunk orientalism. A resolution consisting of pure technobabble bullshit.
Maybe the smartest thing they did was not attempting to commit Molly Millions to the screen. Maybe they didn't have the FX budget, maybe they didn't want to pay Gibson for the rights to too many specifics? Maybe they reckoned the character would upstage Keanu if done correctly, and take the film down with her if not done correctly? Anyway, we get a third-rate knockoff, "Jane".
Jane provides the film's standout moment of unintentional comedy, when, right after Johnny has a literal screaming tantrum in media res about how he doesn't wanna be here, he wants to be in the city enjoying his city-slicker technical boy lifestyle — room service! Expensive hotels! His shirts freshly laundered for him! "Ten thousand dollar a night hookers!" — he collapses in a miserable heap, and the actress does a simply fantastic job of selling a godawful-to-watch moment of, "Well, now I have to fuck him."
Other minor characters pop up, kinda-recognisable from the source material, for seemingly no good reason at all other than, I guess, they had paid for the rights. Ralfi, repurposed as a generic dirtbag. The Magnetic Dog Sisters. They attempted to give the Yakuza assassin a personality and motives and shit, which is entirely against the text and spirit of the original.
Oh, they did an amazingly good job of Jones, considering the rest of this thing; I'll concede that.