The Lawnmower Man (1992) – Review

When is a Stephen King adaptation not a Stephen King adaptation? Probably when you can’t stretch one of his short stories to feature length and so you graft it into a pre-existing script that has nothing really to do with possessed lawnmowers at all. That’s exactly what happened with The Lawnmower Man, a movie that dicked around with the source material so much, King himself sued to have his name removed from any advertising.
I truly get why. I mean, a brief tale concerning a man getting cased by his own, murderous gardening appliance has precious little to do with a sci-fi script called CyberGod that dealt primarily in virtual reality – but that didn’t stop New Line from cheekily hotwiring the two together in order to make a quick buck. But now that the litigious times have long past and we take King’s name out of the equation altogether, does The Lawnmower Man abd its doom-laden prophecies about modern technology actually manage to cut the mustard, let alone the grass?

Dr. Lawrence Angelo is busy working at ways to utilise a mixture of virtual reality tech and psychoactive drugs in ordervto enchanted cognitive performance in chimps during wartime scenarios – but while the clandestine organisation known as “The Shop” obviously is hoping that the next war is fought with performance enhanced soldiers (or at the very least, VR addicted chimps), Angelo still hopes his experiments can be used to better mankind. His hopes are delivered an almighty boot to the happysacks when his most promising ape loses its mind and is killed after attempting to go on a rampage and as a result, the scientist sees his dreams fall harder than a bullet riddled monkey.
However, renewed hope comes in the form of Jobe Smith, an intellectually challenged gardener which the mind of a child who has earned the nickname “the Lawnmower Man” due to the fact that his tends to the local gardens in the area. Removing the “aggression factors” that scuppered the chimps, Angelo hopes that increased exposure to the cyberscape found within virtual reality will help make the happy-go-lucky Jobe smarter by raising his intelligence levels.
After his first couple of treatments, it becomes undeniable that Jobe’s IQ is steadily on the rise, but while the formally simple gardener discovers the pleasures of books, history and even sex, courtesy of an extremely horny neighbour, soon he starts developing a God complex along with some scary new abilities. First, Jobe realises that he can read minds and from there he discovers latent powers of telekinesis – but as he starts to take terrible revenge on those that mistreated him back when he was more innocent, his final goal is to breach cyberspace itself and become a deity for the modern age.

So, as I’ve already covered the King angle (or lack thereof) and the fact that anything from the original short story takes up mere minutes of the runtime means that we don’t have to invoke the author anymore. However, you do have to question why the producers thought they could actually get away with managing to pass off a hysterical techno-fear flick when the source material contained less technological concerns than an Armish barn raising. Still, it wouldn’t be the last time director Brett Leonard would splurge in his rather quaint obsession with VR thanks to the Denzel Washington/Russell Crowe sci-fi forgotten actioner, Virtuousity, that seemingly become all but forgotten these days. Anyway, at its absolute core, The Lawnmower Man genuinely contains some themes that are kind of still relevant today when it come to the use of new technology altering the human consciousness in funky new ways. However, as we know that the worst VR can actually do is give you a brutal case of motion sickness, the movie has dated about as well as that film that claimed Dungeons & Dragons warped young minds or anything to do with the millennium bug.
However, despite the fact that I pride myself in not having my opinions swayed by something as middling as dated special effects, the supposedly mindblowing visuals that The Lawnmower Man was ultimately sold on weren’t actually that special back in 1992, let alone now, and the sight of computer generated figures waving their arms about wildly in front of a screen saver background suffers in comparison to earlier efforts seen in the likes of Terminator 2 or The Abyss. But even if the sequences of weird cybersex play a little like PG Cronenberg, there’s still some amusingly large performances to deal with.

Playing the role of Jobe is Jeff Fahey who has never missed an opportunity to overplay a part and while he dives in feet first into playing a man with limited mental faculties, but for all his wide-eyed innocence, you just can’t shake the feeling that he looks just like Jeff Daniels’ Harry Dunne in Dumb And Dumber. Elsewhere, a pre-Bond, post- Remington Steele Pierce Brosnan also seems dead set on delivering the biggest performance he possibly can whether the scene calls for it or not. Whether he’s recording endless diary entries while inexplicably stripped to the waist and sloughing like a shirtless Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, or having histrionic crash outs in the face of his shady employers, Brosnan seems to be tackling every scene as if its the most melodramatic thing he’s ever read.
As a result, a lot of the admittedly sillier things the film throws at you suddenly become inadvertently hilarious. Reprogrammed war-chimps dressed like they’re trick or treating as Robocop? Jobe reborn as a gurning pixel-god? A man mind-wiped into believing that a Jobe/mower hybrid is trimming his brain? Hank from Breaking Bad as the head of a shifty, government agency? The fact that we’re supposed to be OK with Brosnan experimenting on the learning impaired? Clumsy Christ metaphors? The Lawnmower Man keeps insisting on battering us with truly bizarre plot points that may ensure that the movie isn’t dull for a single second – but it’s also makes it utterly impossible to take it even remotely seriously.

An absurd slice of sci-fi bunkum that only got noticed for both its creaky visuals and how much it managed to piss off Stephen King, The Lawnmower Man may not accurately adapt the author’s story, but you can’t deny that the Firestarter-style plot hues far closer to King’s output than you may think. Even the organisation known as The Shop has popped up in other examples of the Maine Man’s bibliography, so their inclusion here does technically suggest that we’re firmly in King-Land after all. Actually, scratch that remark just in case King’s lawyers are still activated – after all, I don’t think the website could survived getting sued if we logged The Lawnmower Man in the page marked “Stephen King Adaptations”.
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