I recently featured The Lawnmower Man, which was so far removed from the short story it was allegedly based on, Stephen King sued to have his name removed. (It turns out the script existed prior to the producers acquiring the rights to King’s story, so they amended his name and title to the project in order to sell tickets.) It only makes sense I would check out the sequel this week, right? Well, now that I’ve seen it I’m not sure anything about this movie makes sense.
Spoilers for the original film follow….
Jobe, whose digitized consciousness escaped the lab explosion in the original film, is inexplicably human again. Even though we saw his abandoned body wither away and catch fire, the corporate characters of this sequel have managed to recover it from the debris and employ him as a super sophisticated hacker in cyberspace. This time Jobe’s played by Max Headroom’s Matt Frewer, which has gotta be one of the laziest typecasting decisions in the history of film.
Pierce Brosnan is nowhere to be found, either. That’s fine. I have no problem with a sequel continuing the story without the original actors. After all, that was par for the course with these genre films back then. What I do have a problem with is the fact the only returning character is Brosnan’s kid neighbor, who was so insignificant to the original film I didn’t need to mention him when I explained the plot of the previous film two weeks ago.
See, actor Austin O’Brien was a no-name when the original Lawnmower Man came out, but in the following year he co-starred with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero. There’s no reason for the kid to be in this movie, but some executive likely thought they could bank on his newfound fame. That might have worked in more capable hands, but the filmmakers obviously wanted to take the story far into the future. Instead of setting the movie a reasonable amount of time into the future, they set it only six years after the first one (because O’Brien’s character would have been all grown up otherwise) and ask us to believe the world became a dystopian future practically overnight.
Worse, the adult nature of the original film has been sabotaged by a PG-13 rating and a cast of annoying children. I knew I was in trouble as soon as the kids flew around cyberspace via the magic of green screen. It looks like one of those totally radical 90s commercials for Kool-Aid or sugary cereal.
In the lead role you have Sleeping with the Enemy’s Patrick Bergin who more or less looks like Tommy Wiseau. That’s not a complaint. He’s a lot more interesting to look at than Brosnan was in the previous film. He’s also more interesting than Fewer’s portrayal of Jobe, which is a major step back from Jeff Fahey’s nutty take on the character.
What’s amazing about The Lawnmower Man 2 is how far CGI progressed in the four years since the original. I complain about the overuse of CGI quite a bit, but it’s perfectly suited for films with this subject matter. I just think it was a mistake to insert the actual actors into the cyberspace sequences rather than digitize them the way the first film did, if only for continuity’s sake.
If you enjoy cheese as much as I do, this movie isn’t terrible. It’s entertaining enough and the production value is much better than expected—perhaps better than the first—but there are some serious flaws contained within. Again, that’s par for the course when you’re dealing with these kinds of movies.
I honestly don’t remember this movie getting a theatrical release. I always assumed it was a cheap, straight-to-video sequel, but it turns out it was actually a theatrical release which was a lot more expensive than its predecessor. Too bad it’s nowhere near as good.
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