I remember when The Lawnmower Man came out. Me and some pals from school went to take it in, and we all came out disappointed. There was some potential there, but it didn’t seem to work, and didn’t really entertain. The big draw for me and the guys was the fact that it was based on a Stephen King story and that it had, for the time, pretty cool computer graphics.

So here it is, over thirty years later, and I came across the director’s cut which added over a half an hour to the original release. Did it do anything for it?

Well the film still looks very much like a low-budget nineties film, and some of the acting reflects that. Some of it is pretty horrible, especially lighting and set design, to say nothing of acting choices by the cast which is led by Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan.

I don’t want to say the film is ham-fisted, but there’s no subtlety or nuance to the film. If it didn’t have a little bit of nudity, and toned down the language, it could have been a television movie at the time.

The crux of the plot follows a scientist, Lawrence Angelo (Brosnan) working in a military lab run by The Shop. When one of his test subjects, an enhanced chimp, breaks free after killing a guard, Angelo is booted off the project.

But Angelo still wants to work on it, he’s driven, coldly, to continue his research, shifting his focus from chimps to humans. He recruits the local lawnmower man, a mentally challenged fellow named Jobe (Fahey).

Jobe hasn’t had the best life, he’s housed by the church, is beaten, made fun of by the local tough, but is fairly content in his daily life. As Angelo begins to work with him, enhancing his mental abilities, and guiding him through virtual reality interactions, Jobe behind to develop into something powerful, and dangerous.

That danger is augmented when the military lab works to inject some of their aggressive combat coding into Jobe’s mind.

Things are going to go badly. And very soon, he’s going to exact vengeance on those who have wronged him, and his very small group of friends.

Is there a modern-day parable here in regard to the creation of AI, and how it could judge us as wanting? It’s possible. But it also is so, well, 90s, that it’s hard to take seriously on any level. And the computer-generated images just seem silly now. And yet, there was a time when they were considered cutting-edge.

Man, how the times have changed. It’s amazing that a couple of short years after this Brosnan would be James Bond (finally), and while this film was being released, Spielberg was already at work on Jurassic Park, which would see a huge-step up in the CGI game.

The director’s cut is so much better than the original cut of the film, but even this version isn’t great.