The opening credits aren’t even over by the time the bullets begin to fly in Nemesis, one of the better cyberpunk adventures of the early 90s. And boy do the bullets fly. In one scene the heroes and the villains alike are shredding through walls to pass from one room to another. Then the hero (Olivier Gruner) creates an escape hatch in the floor by firing his futuristic machine gun in a circle around his feet.
Yes, this is mindless action, but holy shit is it glorious.
Any character in the film can (and usually will) double-cross the hero without warning—to the point it stops making a whole lot of sense. And it’s not really clear why the action hops from one rundown location to the next, other than that’s just the way director Albert Pyun works. (In an interview with io9, Pyun sheds some light on his methods, which were often more practical than artistic.)
So it’s the future and just about anyone who’s anyone has had their bodies heavily modded with illegal implants. Some of the bad guys have faces which split open like nutshells to reveal automatic firearms concealed inside. Other characters exist as digitized ghosts in the machine to guide the hero through the complicated plot. Meanwhile the (presumably) human character can do back- and side-flips as well as the enhanced characters because fuck it, why not?
In the opening scene, Gruner’s character, a kind of blade runner, is ambushed by a group of cyborgs who leave his less-than-human body on the brink of death in a scene reminiscent of Murphy’s demise in Robocop. After a long recovery in the body shop, he tracks them down, shoots the ringleader, and ends up in a dank jail cell for reasons that are escaping me at the moment. A lot of spectacular shit happens and Gruner finds out his boss (Tim Thomerson) has implanted a time bomb in his heart. Gruner, whose ex-lover has been reduced to an artificial consciousness rivaling Siri, leads him through the web of deceit and explosions, insisting he make his way to the top of a volcano because… well, probably because the film crew had access to a volcano location.
The plot really doesn’t matter. What matters is you get beautiful stunt women, more explosions than you can shake a stick at, and early performances by Thomas Jane and Jackie Earle Haley, the latter of whom I didn’t realize was in the movie until I saw the credits. You should know by now if this is your kind of movie. I’ve enjoyed many of Pyun’s movies, which is why it sucks to read his most recent tweet:
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