The Lawnmower Man
First screened in Spring 1992 / Most recently screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Brett Leonard. Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Jeff Fahey, Mark Bringleson, Geoffrey Lewis, Jeremy Slate, Colleen Coffey, Jenny Wright, Austin O'Brien, Rosalee Mayeux, Dean Norris, John Laughlin, Jim Landis. Screenplay: Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett. In Brief:
However cutting-edge its concerns and ambitions, the movie is arrière-garde in almost every area of film craft.
VOR:③
Archivally interesting for its efforts to interpolate and also to meditate on shifting media regimes and political implications.
My brother and I knew The Lawnmower Man was terrible when we saw it in the theater (I was 14), but I was curious how all the beta-modeling of VR and AI and all the utopian/dystopian discourses around both would look and sound three decades later. It's not hard to whip up some sympathy for a movie that is so confident of being at the simultaneous vanguards of a new cinematic effects regime, a new extra-cinematic entertainment modality, and a high-stakes cultural conversation. You've gotta give director and guiding force Brett Leonard some roses for all that. But as a movie, this remains one big OOF. We'd be talking about how bad Pierce Brosnan is in this if Jeff Fahey weren't pulling focus with a genuine acting catastrophe, including the almost direct prototype for Tropic Thunder's Simple Jack. He's not much better when enhanced by computers and by injected serums and by incoherent screenwriting conceits into a megamind. Every other character is also, sadly, an embarrassment, with the priest and the priest's brother and the pissed-off girlfriend and the corporate Big Baddie and the gas station hooligan (John Laughlin strikes again!) especially egregious.
Styling elements suggest a lot of close study of the Terminator films with some inflections of Tron. None of it comes across as sleek or sinister, though I'll gladly grant that much more expensive movies have looked worse. Pacing is a problem throughout, even (or especially?) in this 140-minute director's cut, and boy, does this seem like exactly the sort of High on Its Own Supply sci-fi epic whose impresario would NOT have wanted to hear "let's just lop off 40 minutes."
Among many other liabilities, the greater length only makes the actual VR sequences seem fewer and far between, though you don't wish there were more. They're garish to look at, with no narrative thrust or pure sensorial appeal, and don't conjure any envy of the onscreen characters getting to participate in them. I can confirm they weren't any more tempting in 1992, but the movie scraped its way into cash cow status if Hollywood math and filmmaker testimonies are to be believed, so who am I to say? Some unambitious, unimaginative flesh-and-blood knob! Grade:D+
