The film never creates the tense, doom-laden atmosphere of William Gibson's short story about corporate espionage in a grim near-future setting, leaving the viewer to spend a numbing hour and half with unheroic and uninteresting characters doing not much of anything. The original story had little in the way of plot as well. It did, however, have a great overlying menace, set in a world where cutthroat corporate Gestapos kill to protect the technology they control. Here you only get a vague hint of that for the first ten minutes, at which point the film settles into a slice-of-lowlife study of its downbeat characters and loses all forward momentum. Watch DEMONLOVER instead for a similar story done right.

Corporate raiders use any trick conceivable to lure a genius into their fold...oh, and to win.This was a rambling and unfocused tale with some mildly interesting plot elements, which suffer completely convoluted execution. Other than some nice camera angles and lighting details, there is nothing at all to redeem this work.Not even Christopher Walken's wonderful performance could save this flop. Willem Dafoe comes close, but no cigar. I suppose it may be worth watching for their performances, but you surely have to be a connoisseur to derive a moment's pleasure, even from that. OH, they're good, don't get me wrong, but the screenplay is horrid. Simply horrid.All in all? Don't bother.It rates a 0.7/10 from...the Fiend :.

It's hard to believe that a movie directed by Abel Ferrara based on a story by William Gibson and starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento would be anything less than great, but this movie is just OK. It has a lot of moody atmosphere. Asia A., the lovely Eurobabe who is supposedly ogre-ish horror-meister Dario Argento's daughter (I, for one, won't believe it until I see the blood tests), spends most of the movie in various states of undress (unfortunately, so does Dafoe). Walken is great as always. But literally nothing happens. It's all atmosphere, eerie music, and occasional bursts of softcore groping. Neither Ferrara's visuals, Walken's acting presence, or Argento's tatooed nether regions can ultimately carry a film so totally devoid of conventional plot, suspense, or action. Not a bad film, just a disappointing one.

I thought it was reasonably faithful to the story, and it had some nice touches. I consider it an iteration, along with Johnny Mnemonic, toward actually making a reasonable screen version of Neuromancer.Not worth watching if you have not read the Gibson short story, though.