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Lawnmower Man 2 - Jobe's War
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| Price | $8.28 | |
| AmazonGlobal Shipping | $14.86 | |
| Estimated Import Fees Deposit | $0.00 | |
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| Total | $23.14 | |
| Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
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| Genre | Horror |
| Format | Multiple Formats, AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC |
| Contributor | Carl Carlsson-Wollbruck, Stephanie Menuez, David Gene Gibbs, Matt Frewer, Trever O'Brien, Camille Cooper, Castulo Guerra, Kevin Conway, Amanda Hillwood, Farhad Mann, Mathew Valencia, Sean Parhm, Ellis Williams, Patricia Belcher, Arthur Mendoza, Ayo Adejugbe, Yoshio Be, Richard Fancy, Patrick LaBrecque, Dale E. House, Crystal Celeste Grant, David Byrd (II), Pamela West, Dan Lipe, Nancy Chen, Molly Shannon, Patrick Bergin, Gregg Daniel, Ely Pouget, Austin O'Brien, Ralph Ahn, Kenny Endoso, John Benjamin Martin See more |
| Language | English |
| Runtime | 1 hour and 33 minutes |
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Product Description
Enter the deadly world of virtual reality, where information is the key to world domination. In this intelligent sci-fi thriller that picks up where the original Lawnmower Man ended, Jobe has become hostage in a futuristic hell. And when he discovers a computer chip that will give him they key to the ultimate revenge, the battle for world control begins.
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 Ounces
- Item model number : MFR794043672729#VG
- Director : Farhad Mann
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Run time : 1 hour and 33 minutes
- Release date : September 7, 2004
- Actors : Patrick Bergin, Matt Frewer, Austin O'Brien, Ely Pouget, Camille Cooper
- Subtitles: : English
- Studio : New Line Home Video
- ASIN : B0000AZT7B
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #84,635 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #1,854 in Science Fiction DVDs
- #4,485 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)
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Several years down the road, Jobe's secret work has lead to a future that's advanced on the surface, but hides a sad underbelly of poverty and unemployment. Jobe's nearly cracked the networking device, but needs to find Trace for the last crucial bits, so he contacts his old friend Pete, who's cruising the streets with a gang of homeless hackers. Pete's overjoyed that Jobe is alive and tracks the nomadic Trace down in a desert home free of modern convenience, only to learn that Jobe has plans of his own for the networking device. Plans that go far beyond the sharing or stealing of information.
First off, this film is cheap. It was made on a nonexistent budget and skipped out of the theaters before people even knew it existed. But, that aside, it works.
The sets and costumes brilliantly portray a Blade Runner-style future clearly divided between the haves and have-nots. The casting is perfect, from Patrick Bergan's portrayal of Trace as a man shoved around so long he finally ran away from the world, to Eli Pouget as Jobe's doctor who falls for her patient's seeming innocence. But the rowdy gang of kids steal the show. Heck, even Frewer, who I normally don't enjoy, does a decent job.
Farhad Mann deserves credit for a well constructed story with plenty of twists and turns that moves at a perfect pace. And more credit for bringing that script to life on such a meager budget.
There's really only two problems I have with the film.
First, Jobe doesn't gel with the original movie. Frewer's portrayal is of an anarchistic goof along the lines of Batman's Joker, whereas Fahey played him as a twisted Buddha who opperates on a mental level beyond those around him. The performance works, though, if you just approach it as a different character.
Secondly, the VR scenes with actors in front of blue screen suffer when compared to the dated but beautiful cgi of the original. They still look fairly good, superimposing the actors over sprawling cybernetic vistas, but I guess I just miss the gimmick from the first one.
I like this movie. I know many out there don't, but I do. It's a rare sequel that tries to take the story off in a new direction.
(PLEASE SEE THE ADDENDUM LIST BELOW)
I want to make one thing perfectly clear before I start this review: I have never seen the original 1992 Pierce Brosnan/Jeff Fahey film the entire way through. That isn't because I don't want to, but simply because I've never gotten around to seeing it in its entirety. I caught part of the original movie on Cinemax or HBO or something about ten years ago but something kept coming up and I only saw bits and pieces of it. This would probably prompt you to ask: "Then why are you writing a review of the critically scathed sequel to a movie you've only seen the last twenty minutes of?" The answer might surprise you, but it's because I'm a "Max Headroom" fan, and when I saw the trailer for this movie recently, I took note that Matt Frewer (the titular "Max Headroom" himself, also Moloch in "Watchmen" and all around great actor from Canada) was in this cyberpunk movie playing a similar character to Max, I said: "Alright, I'll watch it, why not?" So I got a copy of the DVD and here we are.
Virtually everyone on this page has given this movie one or two stars out of five, citing it as a terrible film, a terrible sequel, a terribly made piece of so and so. Again, I've never really put my full attention to the first movie, and from what I understand the first movie is revered by the cyberpunk community as a classic for being the first of its kind and that it was really something special, again, that's cool, I get it. But I watched "Lawnmower Man 2" only knowing bits of the end of the original "Lawnmower Man" and basing this entire experience around my enjoyment of the 1987 sci-fi soap opera "Max Headroom." So, as long as we're all clear that I've never seen "The Lawnmower Man" (Part 1) then you should be able to understand where I'm coming from with this review.
"Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War," AKA "Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace" (I'm not sure why some people call it that as no prints of it I've ever seen use the second subtitle.) begins a few minutes after the ending of the first film. The simple Lawnmower Man, Jobe, is rescued from the debris of the laboratory or... whatever (didn't see the first movie, I don't know what it is) and is put through physical rehabilitation by a corporation who hopes to repair his mind and body with virtual reality. The opening scenes are pretty good, but there's a major off-set to them in that they're shown completely inside a completely square box frame-- I was watching the widescreen version of the movie and the DVD does have the option to watch the 4:3 "pan and scan" version, but this extremely extended "flashback" is contained entirely in a small box frame. This is annoying, but thankfully brief as once the exposition is over, it goes to a full 2:40:1 ratio. Max, I mean Jobe, is reconstructed enough after the cataclysmic events that cripple him and becomes a new pet project of a corporation called "Virtual Light" run by Jonathan Walker who wants him to build something called "The Chyron Chip." Jonathan Walker is a well liked and reputable businessman in this world, but if you're watching the movie, he'd might as well have a Nazi swastika stamped on his forehead because it's painfully obvious that he's the embodiment of evil.
We then cut to "Los Angeles: THE FUTURE," where we meet the movie's only other returning character from the first film, Peter, who is now grown up and living in a furnished railcar in an abandoned subway tunnel deep beneath the gritty streets of LA where he and his friends enjoy hacking into cyberspace to play games. They all hack in at once and proceed to fly around through the air like in "Peter Pan" (probably hence the character's name) and titter girlishly at how splendid everything is in cyberspace. Then there's a cyber explosion and Peter and company get on Troncycles and zip around what looks like a recreation of the Vietnam War when who should appear, but Jobe! Peter doesn't recognize Jobe at first, because in the previous movie he was played by Duke from "Psycho 3," and in this one he's played by M-M-M-Max Headroom, so Jobe uses the magic of cyberspace to materialize a big lawnmower in front of him and then Peter recognizes him. Jobe explains that the cyber-scape is dying and he needs help from someone named Doctor Benjamin Trace, and that if Trace will come visit Jobe he'll help him build the Chyron Chip.
Meanwhile Jobe in the physical world is working at the Virtual Light Institute, where Jonathan Walker gives some government suits a tour of the place in order to get federal funding for their efforts which are, as they put it, something along the lines of: "building a cyber-scape in cyberspace and bringing the entire world online." Are you sensing a pattern, here? Cyber, cyber, cyber, everything in the future is cyber. Okay, again, that's fine, we press on. Jobe is helping the VL build this cyber-scape, but he's also very depressed in the real world, as his legs were ripped off by whatever happened at the end of the first movie and he tells a scientist that "this is her world," and that "my world is... in there." Referring to cyberspace, again. He also seems to have a god complex which, believe me, builds over the course of the movie and culminates in a big way. In the 'real world' he's a simple quadriplegic, but in cyberspace he is a god and his overall intentions seem to cast in shadows.
Peter goes to find Doctor Benjamin Trace, who is living as something of a hermit away from the high tech squalor in a nice cottage in an oasis in the desert outside LA. Trace is Native American, and at first I was a bit worried they were going to pull the old "Magic Indian" card, make him a sort of stereotypical Native who speaks broken English and casts weird spells but this movie, in an oddly pleasant twist portrays Doctor Benjamin Trace as a withdrawn, well read man who has neo-luddite views and prefers the simplicity of connecting with the quietness of a world without computers who happens to be Native American but is extremely in touch with his culture and proud heritage, yet he does not spend the entire movie (or any of it, for that matter) discussing the "spirit of the buffalo" or any other sort of harmful Native American stereotypes you'd expect in a movie with the so-called "Magic Indian" ('The Lone Ranger' comes to mind.).
Doctor Trace reluctantly agrees to come with Peter to meet Max-- I mean Jobe, who has, for all intents and purposes become Max Headroom. He's silly, goofy, he swims around cyberspace making pop-culture references and acts like a generally lovable loon. Until he flies into a homicidal rage and tries to kill everyone when Doctor Trace refuses to help him understand the Chyron Chip's "Egypt" protocol and sends a speeding subway car into the abandoned tunnels headed straight for Peter and company's home. But Doctor Trace saves the day with his hacking skills and thwarts the twistedly eccentric Jobe's plans-- for now.
I could go on synopsizing the plot, but I think you get the drift. I actually took twelve pages of notes while watching this movie, so forgive the wordiness of this review. But, if you're one of the three people in the world looking to buy a copy of "Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War" then you're probably still reading this, which is good because now we're gonna get weird.
This movie is good for all the wrong reasons. The plot is terrible, yes. The acting is awful with the exception of Matt Frewer who seems to be the only person invested in their role, in fact, Frewer seems to be having a lot of fun with the role while everyone else in the movie trudges through it like they have gastroenteritis and a bad inner ear infection and the script is so nonsensical that I actually got lost several times watching this choppily edited movie that has really great effects for 1996 but suffers from a bad case of meddling executives and budgetary issues.
This movie is a warning, not to the people of today as much of the people of 1996. Someone, somewhere in a studio back in the mid 90s saw the internet boom going on and said "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not going to end, well." Now, look at us today: We're all glued to our smart-phones and tablets, laptops, computers, anything that connects us to the internet-- to cyberspace. This movie features all the ugly materialism of today in a metaphoric time capsule that shows how the the things we now have are actually just part of a much larger system of control. For instance, in the movie there's a scene where the bad guy, Jonathan Walker tells Jobe that every idiot in cyberspace is giving him their private information, whether they know it or not, they're just giving it to him. He's using it to exploit them, maybe expose embarrassing secrets or overthrow people he doesn't like all because they just mindlessly gave him everything by signing a contract. We do the exact same thing, today, FaceBook, Twitter, whatever-- everybody everywhere complains about privacy rights on the internet when they're freely handing their rights to Mark Zuckerberg or the people who run Google or the Twitter people and what's worse is unlike in the movie, people in today's world do it deliberately and with a smile.
At first, I thought this was just a coincidence, but I've watched the movie five times, now and it becomes increasingly and painfully more clear upon each viewing that this movie is a cry from the halcyon days of simplicity telling us that we need to stop going so fast because we've turned technology into a religion, just like how Jobe becomes the savior of cyberspace and claims that by following him the material world will fade away and only cyberspace will remain-- it's already happened and we let it happen. Now, whether or not the writer of the film meant this intentionally or subconsciously is up for debate. I'm not saying he was sitting at his word processor, twiddling his mustache and adjusting his top hat planning on taking over the world, I think it was a lot more simple than that-- I think whoever wrote this movie saw what the internet was becoming, had a passing thought about how it might make humanity dumber or even destroy us all and kind of unknowingly built his movie around it.
I mean, the devices they use to enter cyberspace in this film are headsets called "EyePhones." I'm not making that up. If you don't believe me, go watch the film, they call the devices used to enter cyberspace "EyePhones." This movie came in 1996, the same year Steve Jobs got back into Apple Inc. and became the CEO and about ten years later came the "iPhone," which we use to access the internet-- there's a good chance you're reading this review on an iPhone. Yeah. How does that feel? Now, I don't know if Steve Jobs saw this movie and that settled somewhere in his brain and years later he'd revolutionize the way we talk on the phone, but I do think it's eerily prophetic.
Take for example how Jobe's behavior is so erratic and eccentric. He swims around cyberspace, humming the theme from "Jaws" making funny jokes one minute, then slightly more offensive jokes, then he starts cussing people out when he doesn't get his way and chooses to get angry instead of use his seemingly infinite intellect to delineate his problem. This is very much the way we all behave online, our avatars, our usernames, even me in this review, I'm being biased, I'm writing from a stance that's emotionally heated. But Jobe is the nth degree, he's the worst of the worst, he's like the kind of person who swings a baseball bat at a mailbox drunkenly from the window of his car at four o'clock in the morning on a Thursday just because he can. He's a kid with a plaything and he's getting too big for his britches and this is very much reflected in our post "Wild West" internet world. People get carried away online, arguing with each other for hours in comment sections about things completely unrelated to the original subject much the way this review has gone. I'm no angel, but I'm certainly not a complete fool.
And that is why I give "Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War" five out five stars. It elicited an emotional reaction out of me to write this extended review crying out hopelessly to people who have no idea that they've already become one with cyberspace and that they're truly lost. It makes me sad that this movie didn't do better at the box office because if it had, I might not be sitting here at all right now, having to write about what a cautionary tale it was and how nobody listened.
Final thoughts: The movie has excellent special effects, both practical and CGI but suffers from choppy editing that was apparently made against director Farhad Mann's will and with the exception of the always excellent Matt Frewer, the acting is terrible and rushed as is the writing and ultimately the direction. The DVD has nothing on it except a theatrical trailer, the ability to watch the movie with subtitles on for those hard of hearing and some obsolete DVDROM-Online stuff that I couldn't access. So, pick it up, I implore you. It's still a better movie than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."
UPDATE: July 3, 2014 - Addendum 1
I have now seen the original 1992 Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey movie "The Lawnmower Man," the DVD of which I found at a flea market and instead of writing an extended review of that movie, I figured I'd just make a quick note of my thoughts on that film and the contrast between it and its 'sequel.' The original movie, "The Lawnmower Man" is a modern classic, it's a far superior film to "Jobe's War," and a far superior film to many films of the era in general. I'm not sure how they came up with the plot of "Jobe's War" after the events of the finale of the first film tied everything so neatly together making the events of this "sequel" impossible.
The only reason I'm going to retain the five star rating is in hopes that by encouraging people to see this misguided 'sequel' that they may redirect their attention to the original "Lawnmower Man," which is, as I've stated, a modern classic and probably the first film of its kind-- "The Lawnmower Man" presented several themes layered in metaphors and allegories, wrapped in enigmatic storytelling and masterful direction which makes it probably the best movie of 1992. This 1996 sequel is heavily misguided and a missed opportunity at something that could have been great. But if you can't get Jeff Fahey to reprise his role then you've got a serious problem with your script and need to reexamine your priorities. Honestly, now that I've seen the original "Lawnmower Man," it's become number two on my top ten list of favorite movies and this, THIS, I'm no longer sure what to make of this "Jobe's War" fiasco.
UPDATE: November 7, 2014 - Addendum 2
As stated in the first addendum, I've now seen "The Lawnmower Man" and in accordance with this film's title, subject matter and affiliations with that far superior film, I can say that "Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War" (or "Beyond Cyberspace," whichever title this movie is going by...) is not only one of the worst sci-fi movies ever, but possibly one of the worst movies ever in general. They couldn't even get Jeff Fahey back to reprise his role, and while I do like Matt Frewer a lot, I'm surprised he agreed to this film which completely ignores the ending of the original movie.
I can say without any doubt in my mind that not only is this a bad sequel, but it can't even be considered canonical to the first film. It takes place in "the future" and yet the only returning actor's character, Peter, has aged about five years, where the technology in the film has gone up by about three hundred years (by 90s standards). They make a pitiful attempt to allude this film to whimsy, incorporating elements from "Peter Pan" which come off as annoying rather than cute and where there was room for potential the filmmakers instead filled the movie with poor attempts at making a mainstream sequel to a fantastic sci-fi film and failed so badly that the only person in the movie with any fame today is still reduced to minor character roles.
"Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War" is so bad that it ruined the careers of everyone involved with the exception maybe of Matt Frewer, it is a film that not only shouldn't exist, but can't exist within the canon of the original film. The director of this movie was once a reputable commercial director, but is now forever condemned to have "Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace" on his resume and I wouldn't hire him to direct a commercial for local car insurance. The only way to watch this movie is if you're so extremely inebriated that you find it amusing, or put it on your TV when you want guests at a party to leave.
So in conclusion, the moral here is that if you live long enough, chances are someone is going to say the word "cyberspace" in your presence, that is in the context of say: "What about that whole 'cyberspace incident?'" To which you should always reply with: "Oh, please. Can't we just get 'Beyond Cyberspace?'"
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