Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996) – Review

It seems almost deliciously fitting that The Lawnmower Man, a “Stephen King adaption” that utterly ignored its source material, would itself spawn a sequel that also ignored its predecessor to a near insulting degree. In fact, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace seems to be so desperate to move on from its own origins you wonder why the powers that be didn’t just make it its own thing entirely instead of crafting a follow up that connects its plot as clumsily as trying to get Lego to stick to a Duplo brick.
Gone were Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan – the latter changing up impressively due to becoming the next James Bond – and in their place was slotted Matt Frewer and Patrick Bergin with Farhad Mann replacing Brett Leonard in the director’s chair. However, while the first movie amusingly equated the use of virtual reality as promethian fire, the second oddly wants to be a kid centric romp that features sneering CEOs, Bergin as some sort of action hippy and yet more awful CGI that suggests that maybe technology isn’t that must of a threat after all…

After the events of the Lawnmower Man, Jobe Smith is inexplicably alive after escaping the virtual world back into his body before explosives destroyed Virtual Space Industries. However, after having his damaged legs amputated and face reconstructed to look like the guy who played Max Headroom, he’s soon put back to work by hissable corporate tycoon Jonathan Walker who obviously doesn’t realise that his new employee has world ruling tendencies still lurking within that genius noggin. The way he’s going to do it is with the Chiron chip, an invention created by the founder of Virtual Reality, Dr. Benjamin Trace, that is touted as the one operating system to rule them all. Having lost the patent to it in court, Trace subsequently vanished without a… well, trace, but after six years have passed and Los Angeles has inexplicably become a cyberpunk hellhole, Job needs his help to complete the construction of a new and improved chip that will ultimately let him dominate a world reliant on computers.
This means contacting Peter Parkette, the young man Jobe was friends with in his old, simple, pre-VR God days and we catch up with the kid now as a computer hacker living in an abandoned subway car with his other, teen friends. After visiting Peter in the virtual realm and tasking him to contact and bring Trace out of seclusion, Jobe hopes to convince the good Dr. to explain a hidden Nano routine in the Chiron chip named the Egypt link, but after Trace is discovered living life off the grid as a desert-dwelling hippy, he immediately recognises that Jobe is obviously a couple of components short of a hard drive and refuses.
With Jobe pushing hard for world domination, he doesn’t care how much damage he causes to get it, overriding subway trains, helicopters and power utilities in an attempt to build a new world order online. Can a dusty recluse and a gaggle of scrappy kids possibly hope to stand against them.

There’s a sneaking suspicion that director Farhad Mann may not of seen The Lawnmower Man before settling down to pen a sequel, but instead based his follow up solely on a quick read of the synopsis on the back of the first film’s VHS cover. It certainly seems that however he discovered about the film he’s sequelizing, he had no real interest in pursuing the original plot that applied a type of Frankenstein style warning on the dangers of VR and instead tried to deliver something akin to Blade Runner for kids. I mean, I think Mann is trying to emulate Ridley Scott’s visually rich classic, but the overall consensus is that he fell way short and unfortunately invoked memories of Highlander II instead as we visions of a grey, rain slicked world where we can clearly hear the footsteps of everyone on the street, but curiously no one’s bothered to ADR the rain. Furthermore, we find that young Peter from the first film has inexplicably grown up to be The Last Action Hero’s Austin O’brien and is part of a homeless computer hacking gang who rob and steal in order to play video games in an underground tunnel. Quite how this kid has gone from having Pierce Brosnan as a surrogate dad to living like your average Ninja Turtle is never really explained much in the same way that future tech has the ability to rebuild Jobe’s face into someone else entirely but can’t give him prosthetic legs.
However, more strange is how much the film flagrantly ignores huge plot elements from the first film in order to further its own plot. Even ignoring the omission of Jobe causing all the phones in the world to ring at the end of the film hinting that his shot at techno godhood succeeded, how did he get back into his own body when it withered away to a dehydrated husk after his consciousness hauled ass to another reality. Maybe if the actual film was good, you could forgive such things such as weirdly dominant footstep sounds and an utter lack of respect for sequel continuity, but the deeper we get into the Lawnmower Man rabbit hole, the worse things get.

For some reason, both Frewer and Bergin seemed to engaged in some sort of gentleman’s bet as to who can derail the movie first with their performance with the man who once played wisecracking AI, Max Headroom unsurprisingly taking an early lead. Opting to play a man desperate to bcomee a VR despot as Jim Carrey wasn’t exactly on my Lawnmower Man 2 bingo card, however, when Bergin shows up as a man living off the grid who dresses like it’s Burning Man 24/7, he regains a lot of ground in a short amount of time – although I never figured the correlation between renouncing technology and look like you haven’t washed in six years.
To match the misfiring performances and frankly shocking CGI that’s somehow more dated than the stuff in the first movie (what the Hell is that scene  where Jobe shifts forms from a dog to a man like a fucking transformer all about?), the director seems convinced that he’s got a true sci-fi epic on his hands despite the fact that the dialogue scenes are flatter than stale beer and the action is unforgivably bland. Now, I’m not claiming that the original Lawnmower Man was a classic, but at least it knew what it was trying to be with such adult themes as sex and corruption leading the story. Judging by the incredibly mismatched score Lawnmower Man 2 has, it’s trying to be a dystopian, cyberpunk Hook and it proves to be as ultimately annoying as screeching modem sounds being played directly in your ear as you sleep.

An unnecessary sequel becomes an ungodly mess as a clutch of filmmakers take a brisk hour and a half to prove that they have no real understanding of the film they should have been making. One things for certain, somewhere during its release back in 1996, Stephen King must have been laughing his ass off…
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