A megalomaniac corporate chairman has Jobe (Matt Frewer), miraculously surviving his apparent demise in the first film, solving the last problems with the powerful Chiron chip so that he can take over the world. But Jobe is actually working for himself so that he can become a new messiah. It is left to the creator of the chip (Patrick Bergin) and four kids, including Jobe’s old friend Peter (Austin O’Brien), to stop them both.
It’s hard to decide if only a few years has passed since the events of the two films, and the world has been redecorated by god-like aliens who love noir, or if fifty years have passed and both Jobe and Peter had been put in stasis by a different group of aliens. Peter is just a few years older than he was in Lawnmower Man, which was set in the present, but now there are flying cars and a Blade Runner-like urban cityscape. I guess it doesn’t really matter as all those futuristic images pop up only once or twice, to be replaced by normal cars and underground rail lines. Perhaps an editor accidentally clipped in a few seconds of The Fifth Element when he was low on coffee. It’s a minor problem compared to…everything else.
I learned so much from watching Lawnmower Man 2. I learned that when programmers get upset, they put on the leftover Indian costumes from old John Wayne films and pout in cabins in the middle of the desert. I learned that hooking together all the computers in the world has nothing to do with connecting them to a network, but is just a matter of having the right chip on one computer. I learned that complex computer chips are huge and shaped like a pyramid. I learned that if you have the design for a chip that will give you absolute power, you only make one. I learned the expensive security systems protecting the most important item in the world can be fooled by a piece of ice. Oh, so much to learn.
I also learned that Matt Frewer is a horrible actor. It’s taken awhile for me to see that as I like him in Max Headroom (you’ll have to decide what that says about me), but no good actor could have screeched and mugged for the camera with such sincerity. It was a failure of mythic proportions. But then he was acting alongside Patrick Bergin’s glib, play-shaman, so it’s not like he was lonely in the sludge.
What part of Lawnmower Man 2 stands out beyond the others? Could it be the invisible camera that must be flying next to the helicopter to explain what Jobe is seeing? Could it be the techno-babble virus-worm scene at the library where they do a lot of typing? Could it be the dog putting a disk into the computer? Or the homeless kids running their ultra high-tech computer base from an underground railcar? Or when civilization collapses because Jobe uses ultimate power to have bank machines spit out extra money? Or when it turns out the entire plot of needing the chip’s creator to get the full power from it is tossed aside? Or when the chip’s creator decides to take the kids on a commando mission? No. It’s none of those. The real defining moment is when Jobe becomes a moron, and everyone loves him again, because stupid is good. Oh, the happy scene of the legless, mentally retarded Jobe, the kid, and the rest of the team standing in the sun. All is well in the world (Hmmm, I thought everyone was rioting ten minutes earlier).
Writer/director Farhad Mann, who can be confused by both a keyboard and a camera, and probably a toothpick, has not made a film since. Perhaps he is waiting for forgiveness from the Pope. How many Hail Mary’s should he have to say?
For its video release, they renamed it Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War, because the real problem was the film’s title. Yeh.