A blast from the past. An adaptation of a William Gibson short story that no one asked for—but we got it anyway. Or wait... that’s not quite right.

Gibson and director Robert Longo wanted to make a satirical film. Gibson himself wrote the script, keeping only the basic setup from the original story and adding a ton of new stuff. The only problem? No money. Production dragged.

Then—bam! Divine music plays, and from the heavens descends the godlike entity known as Sony, dropping a fat 20+ million dollar bag on the project. Hell yeah, right? Eh... not so fast. The studio bosses immediately started meddling. They didn’t give a single shit about the director’s vision. They wanted one thing: a serious, no-nonsense blockbuster.

Why the sudden shift in priorities? Because Keanu Reeves—already attached to the project long before Sony showed up—blew up in Speed (1994). The movie was a massive hit, and suddenly every studio wanted in on that rising star energy. So Sony did what studios do best: chase the bag. Nothing personal. Just business.

I didn’t know any of this when I watched it. What I did know was that Keanu was acting like a man who forgot how to act, and nearly every character looked like they were in some sort of futuristic soap opera. And you know what? It ruled. The performances and delivery are so bad they loop back around to being good again.

And weirdly, the story holds up. That’s the part the studio execs couldn’t fully scrub out—Gibson’s ideas are still there, and Longo clearly fought hard to keep some of their original vision alive. The cast is god-tier bizarre: Keanu Reeves, Udo Kier, rapper Ice-T, punk icon Henry Rollins, Dolph Lundgren as a cybernetic Jesus freak, and even Takeshi fucking Kitano. The wildest part? The best performance isn’t from any of the actors—it’s from Rollins. Talk about a meta-comedy.

What makes this thing sing is its uniqueness. Yeah, it’s a glorious mess, but it’s a one-of-a-kind mess. And if you squint at it like it’s a live-action anime adaptation, everything starts to make more sense. It adds cohesion, drops your expectations, and doubles the fun.

And then there’s Mr. Reeves. My god, the way his character grumps and freaks out through the whole film—I was howling with laughter. That breakdown scene with him screaming “I want room service!!” is pure cinema gold. Only thing funnier is Danny Glover in Predator 2.