An Instant Way to Feel Even Dumber

I try to give films chances. I don’t like going into movies just to crap on them. You have to think that any movie made was designed by a team of people, actors and writers and other creatives, all of whom wanted to do a good job and create something they could be proud of. Movies take a lot of work, and the people behind them make films not just because it’s a job but because they love movies. So when something comes out you want to give it the benefit of the doubt.

That’s a bit harder when the film in question is a sequel to the notoriously awful The Lawnmower Man, a film so bad and so disconnected from the short story that inspired it that Stephen KingRising to fame with the release of his first book, Carrie, Stephen King is one of the most prolific, and most successful, American authors (in any genre, not just horror). had his name removed from the film’s credits. And when that movie was an outright failure, a bomb so bad that it somehow retroactively tainted the terrible movie it spun out from, you start to have doubts that there’s any chance the film could be good. And yet I still went into Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (also known as Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War) hoping that somehow the infamous ratings for this film were wrong. I hoped against hope that there was a hidden gem somewhere in this movie.

There wasn’t. If anything, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace is even worse than anyone says. This was an incredibly stupid film that barely registers as a sequel to the previous movie, a gnarled and twisted amalgamation of Peter Pan storytelling and The Goonies plotting mixed with bad 1990s CGI and green screen work. It’s nonsensical, it’s idiotic, and it makes you wonder why anyone would want to have their name associated with it instead of doing what King did and suing to make sure their good name was never tainted with this awfulness. It’s bad, but in a way that somehow redefines the term.

The film picks up in “The Future” that is also, notably, somehow just six years after the events of the first film. Peter Parkette (played once again by Austin O'Brien, inauspiciously the only actor to return from the first film) is now an orphan living on the cyberpunk streets of Los Angeles. He gets by as a hacker, living with his friends – Crystal Celeste Grant as Jade, Patrick LaBrecque as Shawn, and Sean P. Young as Travis – in an abandoned subway car while stealing internet access from hapless schmucks. And it’s on one of their times jacking into the VR paradise of the internet that Peter encounters Jobe (Matt Frewer), formerly a lawnmower man but now a god in Cyberspace.

Jobe tells Peter that he’s dying, that somehow Cyberspace itself is dying, and that Jobe needs Peter’s help. There’s a scientist, Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin), who was once the founder of VR, and somehow he would know how to save Cyberspace and, through it, Jobe. But in reality Jobe just wants Trace’s knowledge. Trace once built a powerful chip, the Chiron Chip, and if Jobe could figure out how it worked he could take over the internet. But Trace isn’t so easily fooled, and the second the two meet online, Trace refuses to help. So Jobe elects to go to war, taking on all who could stop him as he tries to cement his immortality as the lord of the Internet.

I have watched some real dogs in my time, terrible movies that made me question why I review movies. But even those weren’t as painfully stupid as Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace. This is a movie that exists in some kind of other world, one where the rules of nature, physics, and technology don’t exist. People jump into VR and it’s suddenly them, against CGI backdrops, running through fields they can touch and smell and feel. And while they have their adventures they spit out technobabble terms that mean nothing, talking about the power of the Internet in ways that make no sense, and it was enough to make my brains leak out my ears.

It’s absolutely clear that Farhad Mann, who wrote and directed the film, didn’t have any clue about the technology he was writing about. This is a film that fails to understand even the basics of internet technology, and doesn’t understand anything about virtual reality. It has less to do with presenting a technological future than it does creating a dumb, goofy, family-friendly adventure. It has the ignoble honor of somehow making Hackers seem like a sound and reasoned treatise on internet technology. It’s patently absurd in the worst way possible.

Bear in mind I wouldn’t hold that against the film on its own if the rest of the movie were enjoyable. Hackers is a stupid, stupid movie but it at least has a delightfully bonkers aesthetic and an enjoyable cast that help to sell the film. It knows just how stupid it is and is somehow able to transcend that. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace has none of that going for it. Its cast of actors are not enjoyable to watch, and it takes its own plot way too seriously to be any fun. It wants to be a smart and scary techno-thriller, but has absolutely no clue how to pull that off.

The fact that the film has barely anything to do with the first movie certainly doesn’t help matters. The Lawnmower Man, stupid as it was, at least tried to tell a story about a good man turned evil by technology beyond his comprehension. None of those events are referenced here, and instead we simply get a movie about an evil dude who wants to be more evil, doing half-assed things in a green screen cyberspace why people talk endlessly about the dangers he could do (without, you know, him really doing much besides sitting in a chair).

And the fact that most of the cast are young adults (in The Goonies age range) certainly doesn’t help matters. It takes a horror movie concept and flattens it down, giving us a group of lost boys (and one girl) trying to stay young and free while battling an evil cyber-guru. The tone of the film is completely different from the first movie, playing more like “baby’s first adventure in front of a green screen” than anything else. It doesn’t feel connected to the world we saw the first time around.

Nor does it look the part either. Say what you will about The Lawnmower Man, but at the time its visuals were striking. Part of why it made any money at all was because it had cutting edge CGI visuals that it built its whole stupid story around. But despite actually having a larger budget, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace looks substantially worse. Its CGI is reserved only for a few, sparing backgrounds, and most of the visuals are just people dancing around in front of green screens, looking really stupid. It’s hard to say where the budget went because it’s clearly not on screen.

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace isn’t just as bad as everyone says. It’s much, much worse. This is a dreadful abomination that was hard to sit through, a painful experience from start to finish that you wished would simply end. The downgrade in acting and in special effects is shocking enough, but what’s truly mind boggling is that anyone thought this was a good sequel to make. The first film wasn’t very good, but Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace is so bad you would think everyone at the stupid would have sobered up from their cocaine highs and said, “wow, yeah, let’s not release this piece of shit.” And yet they did, and the world was worse off for it.