Film / Johnny Mnemonic

Hello, Ultimate Hard Drive.

"I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head."

Johnny Mnemonic is a 1995 cyberpunk film, loosely based on the short story of the same name by William Gibson, in which Keanu Reeves plays the title character, a man with a cybernetic implant in his brain designed to store and transport digital data. The film was directed by the famous painter Robert Longo, with a script written by Gibson himself.

Set against the backdrop of the futuristic year of 2021 in a dystopian world ravaged by a fatal plague, Johnny (Reeves) is a "mnemonic courier" (data trafficker) who has an implant that allows him to securely store data too sensitive for regular computer networks. Johnny uses this implant to deliver such data between contracting parties. On one delivery run, he accepts a package that not only exceeds the implant's storage capacity (and will kill him if the data isn't removed in 24 hours), but also proves to contain information far more important and valuable than he had ever imagined. Johnny must deliver the data before it kills him, but a MegaCorp sends assassins out after him to suppress said data.

The film is also notable for the presence of Takeshi Kitano, making a very rare appearance in an American-made movie, and whose role in the Japanese version of the film was slightly expanded.

Also adapted for a little-known Full Motion Video game for Windows 3 with different actors, as well as a pinball adaptation that is much better received than the movie itself.

The same basic narrative, minus the cyberpunk aesthetic, would later be recycled for the 2003 direct-to-video "mockbuster" Absolon.

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What causes NAS? THIS causes it:

• Aborted Arc: The opening scenes establish that Johnny is going on One Last Job in order to make enough money to afford a surgical procedure to remove the data storage implant in his brain and restore his childhood memories. This surgery is so important to Johnny early on in the movie that he's willing to exceed his implant's storage capacity space just to earn the money that he needs. However, none of this has any bearing when Johnny's character arc is quickly resolved by the end of the film through an entirely different and unestablished means involving the completion of the three-image download code, creating a giant Plot Hole.
• Actor Allusion: Johnny's implant is disguised as a prosthesis for counteracting dyslexia. Keanu Reeves, in fact, suffers from this disorder in real life.
• Adaptation Expansion: The film expands on the 22-page short story and even borrows from Gibson's other stories set in The Sprawl.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Ralfi's two bodyguards are mooks who get beat up on, while in the original short story, they're called the Magnetic Dog Sisters and are very dangerous.
  • Jane's role in the movie is of much less significance than that of the short story's original lead female character, Molly Millions. Where Molly Millions played a very active role in protecting Johnny in the original text, Jane's cybernetic enhancements are treated as an Informed Attribute, and she does little of consequence beyond coming to Johnny's rescue at Ralfi's nightclub. Even after Jane is hired as a bodyguard for Johnny, it's Johnny who winds up doing more to protect her, such as when Johnny pushes her out of the way of a falling car and when Johnny tackles the Street Preacher as he is attempting to crucify her.
• Ahem: J-Bone clears his throat when walking in on Johnny and Jane as they begin to get intimate.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Jane uses one after Ralfi and his bodyguards carry an unconscious Johnny to a back room at a nightclub. The vent is so wide and spacious that Jane is hardly even crouched over and is still walking on two feet while moving through it.
• All Monks Know Kung-Fu: The Street Preacher is a western-style monk who fights in hand-to-hand combat.
• Alternate Monochrome Version: The film saw an alternate black-and-white recut in 2022 in the form of the Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White Blu-Ray. The original film was originally intended by director Robert Longo to be filmed in black-and-white (a tribute to classic sci-fi cinema like Alphaville and La Jetée), and this recut is a version Longo describes as being closer to his original vision.
• Always Night: The only time daylight is ever seen is in the brief glimpses of flashbacks to Johnny's childhood.
• Anaphora: Johnny is fed-up with the Race Against the Clock concerning his lifespan and delivers a Rage Breaking Point induced spiel:
  I want room service!
  I want the club sandwich!
  I want the cold Mexican beer!
  I want a $10,000-a-night hooker!
  I want my shirts laundered...
• Art Imitates Art: Johnny's clothing attire, exaggerated movements, and flailing arms◊ during his over-the-top character monologue (as well as during his occasional spastic seizures) are reminiscent of the various charcoal sketches◊ of sharply dressed men in motion◊, made and popularized by the movie's director, Robert Longo, in the 1980's.
• Artificial Limbs: The bartender at Ralfi's club, Hooky, has an electronic arm.
• Artistic License – Economics:
  • The evil MegaCorp PharmaKom intends to suppress the cure for a fatal disease that has infected one half of the entire global population, their logic being that "treating the disease would be more profitable than curing it." However, their treatment medicines are said to cost as much as a grossly exaggerated "two grand per clinical unit" or more, which would be far more than most people could be expected to afford on a daily, indefinite regimen. All told, PharmaKom's goal of getting billions of patients around the world to pay for their treatment indefinitely would be unattainable when only an ultra-wealthy few could conceivably afford to pay for it at such an exorbitant rate, and yet even the most privileged, like Takahashi's daughter, are not helped by the treatments and continue to die off, anyway. By comparison, the working and clinically tested cure which PharmaKom aims to suppress could stand to be a much more profitable product because it could be made cheaper and more affordable to significantly more patients, would have a greater public demand, and would help a global population remain healthy, thrive, and build an even more prosperous and sustainable world economy in the long term.
  • Even if Ridiculous Future Inflation were in play in regards to prices for PharmaKom's NAS treatments, in less than a year's time alone, the accumulated cost for a typical medication priced at $2,000-per-daily dose would be roughly as much as the extremely expensive one-time "procedure" that Johnny sought to restore his missing memories. PharmaKom's prices are so insanely high, even privatized and nationalized insurance pools couldn't possibly cover these expenses for so many sick people.
• As You Know: One of Johnny's clients in Beijing warns Johnny of the explicit dangers of a courier exceeding one's storage capacity, even though Johnny should already be aware of such risks when using his memory implant, so that the audience can pick up on this important exposition.
• Awesome, yet Impractical: A portion of Johnny's brain was removed or otherwise toyed with to make room for the implant that left Johnny without his childhood memories and, possibly, with stunted emotions and personality. But while, essentially, having lost part of his humanity seems pretty trivial (especially compared to the significantly greater risks that would present themselves had this been a Real Life procedure), even Johnny is so unhappy with this tradeoff that he explicitly makes it clear to his work contact (Ralfi) that he wants to have the implant removed for these reasons. More importantly, uploading anything onto the implant puts such a torturous strain on Johnny that he has to wear a mouth guard, presumably to avoid him biting off his own tongue. Finally, the implant lacks a safeguard to prevent the user from exceeding storage capacity, which is implied to be lethal. One can only wonder what circumstances led to Johnny consenting to such a procedure.
• Berserk Button: Don't call Jones a fish or he'll fry you with his microwave dish.
• Bilingual Dialogue: A conversation between Takahashi and Shinji early in the film begins with them both speaking Japanese, switches to this trope, and ends with them both speaking English.
• Bloody Handprint: Specific to the Japanese cut, before Jane and Jones work together to eliminate the Street Preacher, Jane holds a bloody palm up against the glass of Jones's tank and leaves a bloody streak on it while asking Jones for help.
• Bodyguard Babes:
  • Jane, hired bodyguard for Johnny.
  • Ralfi has two babes for protection, as well. One of them is transgender. In the short story, they're called the Magnetic Dog Sisters, and Johnny can't remember which one used to be male.
  • The female martial artist in the Beijing Hotel room, who isn't enough to deter Shinji and his Mooks.
• Bodyguard Crush: Sure enough, Jane gets all up on Johnny.
• Bond One-Liner: After Johnny, hiding behind a bathroom door, gets the jump on one Yakuza thug, he quips, "Next time knock, Baldy!"
• Bond Villain Stupidity:
  • After Johnny regains consciousness from a Tap on the Head and finds himself strapped to a table in the back of Ralfi's club, Shinji explains the orders he has been given to cut off Johnny's head and freeze it—orders he could have reasonably carried out at any time mere moments prior, while Johnny was still unconscious, instead of waiting for Johnny to wake up and explaining the situation he is in. Consequently, this gives Jane time to intervene before Shinji can carry out his orders.
  • Baldy spends significant time taunting J-Bone when he catches the LoTek leader at a disadvantage, giving Johnny time to sneak up on Baldy and attack him from behind.
• Boom, Headshot!: A PharmaKom mook gets shot with an arrow in her mouth through the back of her neck, courtesy of J-Bone. (See Improbable Aiming Skills described below)
• Book Ends: The scenes at the end in the LoTeks' headquarters assembled from "old world junk" parallel and contrast the sleek, "new world" future look of the New Darwin Inn and Beijing Hotel at the film's beginning. Compare & Contrast the giant fishbowl in the hotel lobby and Jones's water tank; Johnny waking up with Jane in Heaven with Johnny waking up with his anonymous ladyfriend in the opening scene; Johnny's and the LoTek's VR rigs.
• Bowdlerized: In the Japanese cut, Jane's references to her "grenade" are taken out and replaced with "beer opener".
• Brats with Slingshots: Found among the LoTek ranks during a Mexican Standoff with the Yakuza.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: Zigzagged. A very unusual case that likely wasn't originally intended as such. Despite the presence of several pronounced exit wounds bursting from Takahashi's chest when he is shot in the back by Shinji, these powerful bullets passing clean through a decidedly very non-bulletproof human torso still somehow don't hit any of Johnny, Jones' water tank, or Jones all directly in front of Takahashi as he is shot.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The giant pharmaceutical corporation PharmaKom values private greed and profits more highly than the general alleviation of ill health and human suffering.
• Car Fu:
  • The Lo Teks like to set Volkswagens on fire and drop them on attackers.
  • The Street Preacher is intentionally run over by Spider's van at one point, but he shrugs this off.
• Cassette Futurism: In the movie's depiction of the year 2021, commonplace technology from the end of the last century, including fax machines and even VCRs, plays a very crucial role in transferring and storing digital information.
• Catchphrase: Johnny says, "Hit me", before uploading/downloading information to/from his implant.
• Celebrity Paradox: A shot of the back of Henry Rollins's head reveals his Black Flag logo tattoo on the back of his neck.
• Chickification: Happened to Molly/Jane in between the short story and the movie.
• China Takes Over the World: The film's depiction of Beijing, while in a state of unrest, is shown to be a far more sleek, futuristic, and stable economic center than what we see of America (Newark), which is in large part depicted as a crumbling slum. Other details suggesting America's apparent status as a fallen superpower and Asia's dominant influence in the world include Spider's exposition that technology like Johnny's "upscale" neural implant is hard to come by in America and Johnny noting he got his in Singapore. (See Also: Fallen States of America, Japan Takes Over the World)
• Church Militant: The Street Preacher.
• Clean Cut: Performed by Shinji's molecuwire whip.
• Code Emergency: Dr. Allcome.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • J-Bone lending support to Johnny in his escape from Ralfi's nightclub, after having earlier asserted to Johnny, "We're even... I don't owe you shit," is given partial explanation by Jane (whose own involvement with rescuing Johnny is already thanks to sheer happenstance) explaining that she very conveniently just so happens to be "old friends" with the LoTeks that they bumped into and could request such a favor on the spot. However, there's nothing to explain how J-Bone and his underlings knew that their numbers would be useful at Ralfi's nightclub when nobody ever told them ahead of time that the Yakuza would be up to no good over there, unless their mere presence here happens to be yet another extraordinary coincidence.
  • Similarly, Jane's ties to Spider, whose help she needs after she suffers seizures from her NAS condition, also unexpectedly provides Johnny with a lead to "Dr. Allcome" and the "NAS Underground", who also just so happen to turn out to be the original clients to whom Johnny was expected to deliver the data he is carrying.
  • Despite having already demonstrated the sheer lethality of his signature laser whip during the raid on the hotel suite in Beijing and upon his betrayal of Ralfi, Shinji, for reasons unknown, decides not to use this same devastating tool when he attempts to kill Takahashi, who is, instead, plainly shot with a mere pistol just prior to Shinji producing his whip only for a final attempt to claim Johnny's head. However, thanks to this spontaneous, one-time use of a weapon as dull and bland as a handgun from a unique weapon-wielder who didn't even need to have one, Takahashi actually happens to very conveniently survive Shinji's sneak attack just long enough to justifiably pop up in one last appearance and and perform one noble deed for the benefit of the good guys.
  • The "random" freeze frame images forming Johnny's "download code," all originally snapped from a television set with access to a "500 channel universe," just so happens to include a picture of the Artificial Intelligence that's stored on PharmaKom's computer network.
• Conversation Cut: After Spider explains the meaning of the name "Dr. Allcome" and that the intended fax for the copy of Johnny's download code was "meant for us," he walks away while Johnny asks, "Who's 'us'?" The conversation then continues immediately from where it left off in a completely different location as Johnny repeats, "Who's 'us'?"
• Convulsive Seizures:
  • A periodic, if infrequent, symptom of "synaptic seepage" from Johnny's neural implant.
  • A more common symptom of NAS when carriers don't get necessary treatment for the disease.
• Courier: Johnny works as a "mnemonic courier" who is routinely tasked with transporting digital information between contracting parties.
• Crazy-Prepared: As it appears, long before Jane is first seen arriving at Ralfi's club with Spider and inadvertently chances upon an unconscious Johnny being carried into a back room, she had already left personal weapons in the care of the club's bartender, as well as stashed more weapons in a heap of garbage in a back alleyway behind the same location, just in case a situation where she could use them were to suddenly arise out of nowhere.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: PharmaKom wants to suppress the cure for NAS because "treating the disease is more profitable than curing it"... but they went through the time and trouble of reinvesting their profits on researching and developing the very same working cure, anyway. If they did all that, then they may as well should market the cure and recover the expenses they had to pay to get it made in the first place, instead of hiding it from everybody (including themselves).
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • The brain implant Johnny received for his job as a courier required him to remove the memories of his childhood, which makes him less of a whole person.
  • An additional scene with the Street Preacher in the Japanese cut explains that the character's obsession with cybernetic upgrades is a consequence of having contracted the NAS disease. As the disease destroys his organic body, he gets artificial parts and upgrades to gradually replace it, which, in turn, makes him increasingly insane and delusional. In his own view, he sees himself as a "post-human" individual.
• Cyberpunk: Adapted from the work of the innovator of cyberpunk, William Gibson.
• Cyberpunk Is Techno: Featured in the film. The short story prominently features a fight set on an arena that produces techno beats based on the movements of the combatants.
• Data Drive MacGuffin: The titular Johnny is a data courier who carries gigabytes of data in his head in a world where the evil mega-corp PharmaKom monitors all network traffic. Johnny's brain is effectively a wetware hard drive that's holding the cure to a neural plague. PharmaKom has a monopoly on the expensive (read: highly profitable) treatment, so they dispatch killer mooks to intercept Johnny before he can download the data to his client.
• Deadpan Snarker: Several of Johnny's lines are certainly written with this in mind:
  Jane: Man owes me fifty thou and he’s scamming my phone card!
  Johnny: It's still our first date.
  • When explaining how he learned to pick locks: "I used to have a summer job breaking and entering."
  • Johnny's response to a roomful of men in a hotel room pointing guns at him is to hold his briefcase up on its side at shoulder level and ask the room, "Double cheese, anchovies?"
  • "What did they upload, Ralfi? The goddamned Library of Congress?"
  • "If I wanted the silicon dug out of my back brain, I would have gone to Mexico City!"
• Death by Irony: Shinji was supposed to cut off Johnny's head, only for Johnny to cut off Shinji's head (and with his own signature weapon, too).
• Demanding Their Head: PharmaKom tasks Yakuza assassins, led by Shinji, and the Street Preacher with cutting off and returning Johnny's head in a cryogenically preserved container, as it contains a neural implant with important information in it.
• Designated Girl Fight:
  • In the back of Ralfi's club, Jane gets carried away with exclusively wailing on one of Ralfi's Bodyguard Babes.
  • Similarly, during the movie's climax, Jane does nothing to get involved and protect Johnny, her client, when Shinji chases after Johnny and tries to cut off his head, and, instead, focuses all of her attention on repeatedly smacking a hapless Mook who is too inconsequential to even try and fight back.
• Deus ex Machina: During the climax, Johnny escapes death when the Virtual Ghost stored on PharmaKom's computer mainframe (and quite literally existing as a "god" inhabiting an electronic machine) suddenly intervenes by somehow taking over the LoTeks' network to confront Takahashi, while also somehow knowing precisely where he is in the base and that, at the very same moment, he's pointing a gun at Johnny and has him cornered. What's more is this sudden appearance is necessitated to reveal a lot of exposition just to allow Takahashi a last-minute Heel–Face Turn. While we would have already known that Takahashi has a deceased daughter, it is only at this moment late in the film that we're suggested her death may have actually had something to do with NAS. This moment is unusual in that for all the times the AI has reached out to Takahashi already, it is only at this precise time at the story, right when Takahashi is threatening the hero's life, that the AI finally tells him exactly what she herself had already known all along could force a change in him.
• Delivery Guy Infiltration: Parodied. Caught in the wrong room by armed thugs, Johnny hefts his satchel over his shoulder and innocently asks, "double cheese, anchovies?"
• Diagonal Cut: Performed by Shinji's laser whip, as seen when slicing through a stone statue at the Beijing Hotel suite and when killing Ralfi.
• Divided States of America: Johnny flies from Beijing to "The Free City of Newark." (See Also: Fallen States of America)
• Diving Save: When two bumbling LoTeks drop a flaming car on top of Johnny and Jane, and Johnny has to dive and shove Jane out of the way while she is caught totally unawares and unable to use her incredible Super-Reflexes that we've heard so much about when she was introducing herself at the beginning of the movie.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: The LoTeks override television signals from around the world and send out their own transmissions.
• Dragon Their Feet: The Street Preacher shows up to try and claim Johnny's head long after Shinji and Takahashi are both already dead.
• Dueling Hackers: When Johnny is diving through the net looking for leads, a PharmaKom hacker is trying to trace him down and dumps a virus on him.
• Dull Surprise: Johnny's childhood memories were removed from his brain to make room for his cybernetic implant, negatively affecting his emotions.
• Dutch Angle: Several shots throughout the movie are framed like this. One such tilted camera shot that gets a lot of notice, in particular, involves Johnny and Jane running through a cloud of smoke emanating from a sewer grate as they make their getaway from Ralfi's club, while Johnny can be clearly seen still holding a gun he had just chucked away in the previous shot.
• Everything Sensor: An X-ray scanner seemingly intended just to check for signs of contraband and illegal bio-mechanical upgrades and implants at a customs/border security station also does a thorough CAT-scan of a person's body and dispenses medical advice when it notices any health risks (such as "synaptic seepage" from a brain implant).
• Expy:
  • Jane was created to replace the female lead from the original story, Molly Millions, because another film studio owned the rights to use that character in a movie.
  • The bartender at Ralfi's club, Hooky, is modeled after Ratz, a bartender in William Gibson's Neuromancer who also has an electronic arm.
• Extreme Graphical Representation: The computer virus sent to "burn" the artificial intelligence out of the PharmaKom computer mainframe is conveyed with a fire effect superimposed over her face.
• Fallen States of America: All signs in the future setting point to the United States being a crumbled superpower—most likely the aftermath of a vague, unspecified "war" alluded to by Jane—while Asian countries have emerged as the world's most dominant economic and technological powers. Of what we're explicitly shown in the movie, Newark, New Jersey is now considered a "Free City" where sovereign control is mostly in the hands of MegaCorps and organized crime, while everyone else living in total squalor in the junk piles and remains of the "old world" more regularly spark confrontations and growing uprisings against their status quo. A recognized, if still-functioning, United States government is never mentioned or suggested at any point in the movie.
• Faux Action Girl: Jane. While her counterpart Molly Millions in the original short story is a far more legitimately badass, cybernetically enhanced "razorgirl" who actively protects Johnny, Jane does little of direct consequence beyond coming to Johnny's rescue in the back of Ralfi's nightclub. Ironically, it is Johnny who does more to help Jane, such as taking her to Spider to treat her NAS condition, pushing her out of the way of a falling car, and rescuing her from the Street Preacher. At one point during the film's climax, Jane is even somehow incapacitated and restrained off-screen by Shinji's Mooks and held up by one of them as a Human Shield!
• Future Music: The nightclub features an opera singer singing over a techno/metal rhythm.
• Future Society, Present Values: J-Bone explains the LoTeks' tactics as hijacking television signals from "their 500-channel universe," and generally suggests that television is the dominant brain-rotting, tool of oppression used by "The Man". Apparently, William Gibson never accounted for the brain-rotting potential of the Internet.
• Gadget Watch: Johnny detonates a small bomb by pressing a button on his wristwatch.
• Godhood Seeker: The street preacher's goal is to become an essentially immortal cyborg with money attained from contract killings; he believes that once he finishes his latest job, retrieving Johnny's head for the yakuza, he could use the reward money to become a god. (See Also: Transhuman)
• Goggles Do Nothing: J-Bone wears a pair of ski goggles covering his forehead at all times.
• Heroic Dolphin: Jones is a dolphin with cybernetic implants who helps Johnny retrieve the data from his head.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Spider gives himself up to be crucified by the Street Preacher so that Johnny and Jane have an opportunity to escape with the NAS cure, likely to set an example for Johnny the Jerkass about what it means to be willing to sacrifice oneself for a greater good (it doesn't really help).
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Johnny's (implicitly illegal) data-smuggling implant scans as a perfectly legal dyslexia-correction implant.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Shinji has his head cut off by his own Razor Floss whip. And then a shipping crate on fire falls on top of his headless corpse, just in case there are any doubts as to whether or not he's actually dead.
• Holy Hitman: A cyborg assassin who dresses like a Franciscan monk and spouts scripture. This character is taken all-too-literally from a brief mention in Neuromancer, when Molly describes the assassin who finally caught up with Johnny as being "like a monk," referring to his zen confidence.
• Human Hard Drive: Johnny delivers digital data that is stored in is head.
• Human Shield: Unlike most examples of this trope, where a villain resorting to this would typically appear to be already beaten, at a point during the movie's action climax when Shinji already has the upper hand and an unarmed Johnny at bay, one of his Mooks carries out Jane, now a hostage, held at gunpoint. Humorously, this situation ends with Jane elbowing her captor in the abdomen, who folds up like an umbrella—without also reflexively tensing up his trigger finger and subsequently blowing Jane's head off and despite wearing a full upper body bullet-proof vest, which is designed, after all, to absorb and redistribute kinetic energy.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Johnny's entire focus throughout the entire movie is to see that his neural implant is removed and his childhood memories are recovered. He also just wants a club sandwich and a hooker, but that's another story. Regardless, he's never all too happy about having the fate of the entire world on his shoulders, and, frankly, doesn't care all that much.
• IKEA Weaponry: Johnny strips down his captured carbine to a more convenient pistol size.
• Impaled Palms: Part of the Street Preacher's crucifixion motif, as seen when killing Spider and attempting to kill Jane.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Shinji's signature weapon—the laser wire whip that extends from his thumb. Even as portrayed, this looks like it would be hard to direct or control through the air. Since we see it slice cleanly through a stone statue during the mass raid at the hotel room, nobody should want to be one of Shinji's comrades standing by whenever he's whipping that thing around. At the climax in the LoTek base, the unwieldily whip even takes out Shinji's own footing when he tries swinging it at Johnny and inadvertently cuts the platform's support chains.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: From the top of his suspension bridge headquarters, J-Bone sights a mook on the ground several meters below, aims for a second, and fires an arrow straight into her open mouth.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In the opening of the film, Johnny's lady companion's explanation for leaving the hotel room in her coat is that she's "just getting some ice," which Johnny realizes they already have as she slams the door.
• Information Wants to Be Free: The information Johnny is hired to deliver turns out to be the cure for a global disease NAS, while a MegaCorp seeks to steal his head so it won't be given to the public. On the flip side, the underground resistance wants to share the information for free.
• Informed Attribute: Jane is supposedly wired to the gills with cybernetic enhancements, but we never see her do anything superhuman or above ordinary with them. Most egregious of all, when the two bumbling Lo-Teks drop a car above her and Johnny, Jane—who boasts about having Super-Reflexes early in the movie—never even realizes what is happening, and Johnny is the one needing to react quickly enough to make a Diving Save to push Jane out of the way for her own safety.
• Inside a Computer System: Johnny "hacks his own brain," and his VR avatar explores the inner workings of his implanted hard drive.
• It's All About Me: Johnny always thinks only of himself and his own interests. In the events that follow Jane rescuing him from Ralfi and Shinji at the nightclub, Johnny returns the favor by scamming her "phone card" and even trying to leave her for dead in a pile of trash when she suffers a seizure from her NAS condition. Johnny decides to get Jane help for her seizures only after she insists that same person who could help her could also help him. He initially refuses every proposal to retrieve the data from his head, because there is always a risk that he may suffer permanent brain damage, despite the fact that he and the rest of the world would meet a worse fate if he leaves the data in his head, anyway. Even after discovering the data is a supercure that can help half of the world's population, he goes on an infamous rant whining about how he'd rather have a $10,000 hooker than save the lives of millions.
• It's a Small World, After All: After Johnny is betrayed by his one contact in the city, Johnny is left to run around Newark with no leads as to how to "download" the data in his head. Fortunately, every single stranger he crosses paths with just so happens to have important and extremely helpful ties to La Résistance who are fighting the gangs and corporations that are after Johnny's head and/or the originally intended recipients of the data Johnny is transporting.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: In tracking down Johnny, the Street Preacher has a penchant for torturing the people who he believes have useful information on Johnny's whereabouts, principally the bartender from the Cyberpunk club and Spider. It works. It's unclear but suggested that he kills his informants after they reveal to him everything they may know.
• Japan Takes Over the World: The Yakuza is "the most powerful of all crime syndicates." Takahashi's standing with the Yakuza puts him in charge of overseeing an international corporation's regional operations in an American city; likewise Shinji is tasked by the corporation's headquarters in Zurich to carry out their dirty work across international borders.
• Karmic Death: The Street Preacher, who tended to put all his victims in a crucifixion pose, dies in this pose.
• La Résistance: LoTeks, "A resistance movement risen from the streets: Hackers, data-pirates, guerrilla-fighters in the info-wars."
• Large Ham: Dolph Lundgren as the unhinged, murderous, and often boisterous Street Preacher.
• Laser Blade: Shinji's glowing molecuwire whip. The orange, golden glow is because an invisible wire whip wouldn't be interesting to look at, but it also implies it's high-energy.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: When Johnny had his brain implant installed, only the memories of his childhood were removed.
• Living MacGuffin: Dr. Allcome and, after that one served its full purpose, Jones.
• MacGuffin: Like a Russian nesting doll, the most important function of the film's principal MacGuffins is to help Johnny acquire additional MacGuffins.
  • The narrative's most central and primary MacGuffin would be the three-image download code, which winds up separated into three parts and needs to be completed in order to retrieve...:
  • The data Johnny uploaded into his brain, which he aims to transport and remove from his head in order to get back...
  • The lost memories of his childhood.
• Made of Iron: The Street Preacher. A scan of his body indicates that much of his body has been replaced with bio mechanical parts and upgrades. J-Bone claims that the Preacher "doesn't have one natural bone left in his body." With his upgrades, the Street Preacher can get up and walk away from being hit by a van at high speed.
• Magic Countdown: If Johnny can't get the 320 gigs of data out of his head in 24 hours, he will die and the data will be lost forever. However, Johnny always seems to have the maximum 24 hours available to him to complete his quest. After Johnny travels halfway around the world from Beijing to Newark (which should take up a chunk of time one way or another), the Everything Sensor at customs in Newark still estimates that Johnny has a full 24 hours to seek medical attention. Then, later, halfway through the movie and after Johnny has survived three further attempts by the yakuza to capture him and/or cut off his head and takes a nap in a subway tunnel, Takahashi still gives the Street Preacher a 24 hour deadline to bring him Johnny's head when, at this point in the movie, it would be much more plausible if there are only 12 or 13 hours left (at best) before the data is lost. (See Also: Race Against the Clock)
• MegaCorp: PharmaKom, principally. The Opening Scroll suggests that large corporations in general hold enough power to effectively "rule" the world in 2021 and have their own private defenses.
• Mexican Standoff: Between groups of LoTeks and Yakuza / PharmaKom goons outside Ralfi's nightclub. Shinji and his Mooks wind up backing down from the confrontation, while threatening vengeance against the LoTeks.
• Middle-Management Mook: Takahashi is only the regional head of PharmaKom who oversees the corporation's affairs within the Newark area. Takahashi's position of power is so subordinate to that of the Corrupt Corporate Executives on the Company Board (the real Big Bads of the movie, who are never named or seen in the entire story) that he isn't even made fully aware of his superiors' exact motivations for wanting Johnny's head or that they cheated him out of something which could have saved his young daughter's life.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • Johnny's client at the Beijing Hotel with the long hair and glasses principally functions to convey a few crucial pieces of early exposition on the size of data to be uploaded, where said data is expected to be delivered, the dangers of a mnemonic courier exceeding his storage capacity and, less importantly, specific details on how a mnemonic courier is supposed to be paid.
  • In the American re-cut, J-Bone is seen filling this role when observing Johnny "hack his own brain" from a private monitor and throws out nuggets of exposition to the audience so they can better understand what's going on ("He's doubling himself", et. al.).
• Mr. Smith: Johnny's obvious pseudo-surname when at the Beijing Hotel and on his passport on his flight to Newark. Johnny even throws his passport in the trash once he arrives in Newark so as to make it absolutely clear that Mr. Smith is not his real name.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Johnny has knowingly put too much information into his head chip.
• Mysterious Past: Johnny's backstory before he wiped his long-term memories and began working as a courier is vague and largely undefined. It is suggested at the end, after he regains his childhood memories, that his mother was the woman who became the Virtual Ghost on PharmaKom's computer mainframe, but this still leaves many more significant details about Johnny's past, including how or for what reason he ever agreed to have these same desired memories erased in order to embark on his chosen career path, unexplained.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The bartender seen with the electronic prosthetic arm is a reference to Ratz, a bartender introduced early in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
  • During the cyberspace scene, as Johnny is searching for the copy shop that his download code was supposed to be sent to, there is a brief flash of the words "Ono-Sendai"—the brand of the Cyberspace-7 cyberdeck that Case uses in Neuromancer.
• The Needs of the Many: The data Johnny is carrying inside his head can save millions of lives. However, Johnny spends a significant portion of the movie putting his own life ahead of everybody else, as well as initially rejecting every proposal to retrieve the data because there is a chance that doing so could kill him or leave him with significant brain damage (even though he would die if he doesn't get the data out of his head, anyway). In the end, Johnny is convinced to go through with an attempt at removing the data from his head NOT because he'd be helping millions of other lives but because it's pointed out to him that that there being a chance that retrieving the data would kill him would also mean there is a chance he'd survive, whereas Johnny's other possible fate leaves him no such chance.
• Neon Sign Hideout: Zigzagged, in addition to being a completely unintentional occurrence. Everything about the LoTeks' main base calls so much obvious attention to itself. It's located at a major, very noticeable local landmark (a suspension bridge); they run lights and electricity which makes their own living quarters on the bridge's underside visible for miles beneath the perpetually nighttime sky, and their main line of defense is to very unsubtly drop exploding cars directly underneath their location. But despite the massive, obvious attention all of this should call to their hideout, it somehow remains a complete secret from their enemies until Johnny simply tells them where it is.
• Neuro-Vault: This is the function for Johnny's implant. He personally can't access the data, but neither can anyone else without the right code.
• Niche Network: While watching TV at the very beginning of the movie, Johnny tunes in to The Nostalgia Channel.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Dolph Lundgren as the cyborg contract hitman who dresses as a Franciscan Monk.
• Noodle Incident: Multiple instances. "The war" that Jane tells us Jones fought in, whatever the reason Strike owes Johnny a favor for, the past mistake that Shinji had to atone for before he got his molecuwire whip, and so forth...
• Not Quite Dead: Subverted. For a moment, it appears that the cybernetic street preacher's charred skeleton is picking itself up off the ground after the character was seemingly burned to death (accompanied with a note on the music score spelling absolute dread), only for a wider shot to reveal that a group of LoTeks are lifting the carcass off the ground with a pulley and disposing of it.
• Off with His Head!: How Shinji meets his demise when he's Hoisted By His Own Petard.
• One-Book Author: This was the only feature film directed by Robert Longo, who was world renowned as a highly influential painter and sculptor before and after the film was released.
• One Last Job: Johnny wants to leave his line of work and restore his lost childhood memories. He agrees to do "one more run" for Ralfi in order to get enough money to afford an expensive "procedure" to restore those memories. However, the need for that money for that procedure is never brought up in the movie again, and he inexplicably ends up requiring neither money nor the procedure to get what he seeks.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Spider, J-Bone, Baldy, Hooky, and Strike, principally. The end credits also identify several bit-part characters whose names aren't given in the film itself by nicknames. Various LoTek characters with small speaking parts are identified in the credits as 'Toad', 'Stump', and 'Buddy'; the actor and actress who portray Ralfi's bodyguards are credited as 'Yomamma' and 'Pretty'.
• Only One Name: His name is just "Johnny", which prompted the mockery of Spider. Since he sacrificed the memories of his childhood to make room for his cyber-implant, Johnny apparently forgot his family name, which may or may not have been Kalmann, judging by the name of his mother, Anna Kalmann.
• Opening Scroll: Present to help get viewers up to speed on the the future setting, explain the NAS plague, sort out the various factions of mnemonic couriers, corporations, LoTeks, and the Yakuza, and touch upon "black ice computer viruses" and "wet-wired brain implants."
• Phlebotinum Dependence:
  • Paralon-B, one of the few publicly available treatments for NAS, is only available from PharmaKom at "Two grand per clinical unit." Most metaphorically suggested where evidence of Jane's cybernetic implants are presented as resembling track marks, like a needle drug addict would have. Jane also suffers from NAS and goes through a form of "withdrawal" when she doesn't receive the drug treatments that she needs.
  • The extended Japanese cut of the movie reveals Jones, the dolphin, to be addicted to an unnamed drug. J-Bone explains that the Navy got him hooked on the stuff so he could work for them, and J-Bone continues giving him this drug so that he believes he's still swimming.
• Pin-Pulling Teeth: Jane pulls the pin from her pink hand grenade with her teeth. In a minor variation, she doesn't pull the pin itself, but rather the softer keychain attached to it.
• The Plague: Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (aka NAS, "The Black Shakes") infects half the world's population by 2021. In Spider's words, this is a consequence of the overabundance of Wi-Fi electronic signals "poisoning the airwaves".
• Plot Coupon: Several items are introduced with the purpose of advancing a single part of the story in the next one or two scenes that follow and never coming into play again.
  • The collapsible metal spear weapon that Jane acquires from the bartender is quickly used to rescue Johnny from the back room of Ralfi's nightclub.
  • Jane reveals her grenade to Johnny before he tells her that he needs to find a computer, only to use it in their getaway in the following scene, after Johnny accessed a computer.
  • Johnny steals a phone hacking tool from a computer storage room and immediately uses it in a subsequent scene to make contact with a member of PharmaKom.
• Plot Hole:
  • In the movie's opening scenes, it's quickly understood that Johnny must undergo a very expensive and delicate "procedure" in Chiba City to remove his brain implant if he were to regain the lost memories of his childhood (If not, to restore the literal chunk of his brain which housed those memories and was removed to make room for his Neuro-Vault). In fact, it's Johnny's deep desire to obtain enough money just to afford this very procedure that leads to him accepting the courier gig in Beijing, overloading his brain implant in order to complete the job, and setting the whole film's plot in motion. However, the story inexplicably concludes with Johnny's lost memories returning to him by simply completing the three-image download code which accesses the information that was uploaded to his Neuro-Vault. There is nothing done to explain how the download code for the data in Johnny's implant could return his lost memories to him when it was already established that Johnny needed to seek a completely different route to retrieve them, not to mention that the simplest possible explanations would infer that Johnny's childhood memories were already a part of the data that he had uploaded onto his implant at the Beijing Hotel, which still makes no logical sense and only raises more unanswered questions.
  • A crucial point about Johnny revealing to PharmaKom the location of the LoTek headquarters is not adequately dealt with in the final third of the film. It's foreshadowed that Johnny should now be put directly at odds with the LoTek faction or face some repercussions for this action; as Jane says, "Now if they don't kill you, J-Bone will." But this issue is abandoned immediately after this line is spoken. J-Bone and the LoTeks wind up giving full, unconditional assistance to the very person responsible for their enemies attacking them. Neither Jane (who is supposed to be "old friends" with the LoTeks and clearly not approving of Johnny's decision) nor Johnny (assuming he wasn't just being an idiot and had some kind of crafty trick up his sleeve to squash PharmaKom and the Yakuza) gives J-Bone any forewarning that their enemies are on their way to lay siege to their hideout or tries to stress any need to prepare for this, and Johnny is never held accountable for his role in the violence, death, and destruction inflicted upon the Lo-Teks.
  • The LoTeks' base, located high above the ground on the underside of a suspension bridge, requires extraordinary means to get inside. The LoTeks had to rig an elevator for themselves and their allies to gain entrance, while their enemies, like Shinji and his tactical squad, are seen hoisting themselves up with the aid of specialized mechanical cable rigs, and Takahashi had to take a helicopter to get to the top of the bridge... but the Street Preacher just suddenly appears in the very heart of the LoTeks' base without any indication of how he could have scaled the enormous architecture and have found a way inside.
  • In Jane's first scene, where she tries to get work as a bodyguard for Ralfi, she never tells anyone her name (and no one else ever refers to her by her name). Later, when the audience does finally learn her name, it's said by Ralfi, who, previously, never demonstrated to have known her that well.
  • When Johnny and Jane are being chased by Shinji after their escape from Ralfi's nightclub, they receive protection from J-Bone and a large group of LoTeks ...who have no clear reason for being there (it is already established before this scene that the LoTeks have their own headquarters, which is not where Johnny and Jane are when they're running from Shinji) and were never given any advanced notice that something was going down at Ralfi's nightclub which could use their attention. Presumably, we're led to believe that J-Bone and a very large group of his underlings were out on a single massive patrol and just so happened to fall on top of this situation by chance. J-Bone coming to Johnny's rescue in this situation also directly contradicts a prior scene in which J-Bone explicitly says that he doesn't feel he owes Johnny any favors, heavily implying that he doesn't want anything more to do with Johnny, without providing an adequate explanation as to why J-Bone would suddenly want to give him any kind of help at all.
  • After blacking out momentarily in a subway tunnel, the filmmakers establish that Johnny's life-threatening condition from carrying too much computer data in his head is worsening and his brain is deteriorating, and one camera shot of Johnny's hands and fingers cramped up and twisted after the blackout further suggests damaged motor functions. However, in the cyberspace setpiece scene which subsequently follows this, Johnny is clearly observed making several complex actions and commands using his hands with great dexterity, quickness, and precision.
  • Specific to the Japanese cut of the movie is a scene where Johnny acquires his "memory doubler" before heading up to the hotel room to meet with his latest clients. The scene clearly establishes that Johnny was expecting to receive a much larger "upgrade" device and is not satisfied that the best thing he can get a hold of is the doubler, which Johnny says in his own words is "not even close" to what he would require for the job he signed on for. However, Johnny's entrance in the hotel room still plays out with the character asking his clients how much data they have to upload and being surprised to suddenly find out it would greatly exceed his storage capacity.
  • An ending revelation that the Virtual Ghost was Johnny's mother when she was still living and working as the Founder and CEO of PharmaKom leaves a lot of crucial details about Johnny's past, between his forgotten childhood and when he began working as a data courier, unexplained. Principally, how did someone raised in a life of immense wealth and privilege become separated from his gilded upbringing, why would he have ever wanted to forget his past (by way of having a part of his brain removed) and seek employment in a line of work far beneath anyone of his initial social stature, and why would he not already have a significant inheritance from his mother's estate (including any part of her original stake in ownership of the profitable corporation she had created) that could afford him to pay for the "procedure" he now seeks in order to restore the same childhood memories that he had previously decided to part with?
• Post-Final Boss: After the movie's most threatening antagonists (Shinji and the Street Preacher) are dealt with, Johnny still has to "hack his own brain" where he has to contend with a computer virus, which isn't anywhere near as dangerous (or as interesting) as the other enemies Johnny had to deal with.
• Posthumous Character: Takahashi's daughter.
• Powers That Be: We're told that the upper echelons of the PharmaKom corporate ladder are the ones responsible for wanting the cure to NAS suppressed and establishing the entire evil conflict, but who these people are, how they rationalize running their business the way they do, and what happens to them by the end of the story is a mystery.
• Predatory Big Pharma: The MegaCorp Pharma Kom produces a treatment for the disease NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome) that earns it a great deal of money. During the course of the film, it tries to violently suppress a permanent cure for NAS that would reduce the number of customers for the treatment and its profits.
• Product Delivery Ordeal: Johnny is a "mnemonic courier," and the story follows him on one of his hired gigs, but once Johnny uploads the data to his implant, his task of transporting it to its destination is made considerably more complicated following the hotel room being raided by the Yakuza, the download code for the data not being faxed to its recipient in time, his contact in Newark betraying him, the Yakuza making more attempts to claim his Johnny's head, and PharmaKom hiring the Street Preacher to join the manhunt, as well. Not to mention that the data Johnny uploaded has overloaded his implant and is slowly leaking into his brain and will kill him if he can't download it in time.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Johhny's "I... want... roomservice!" rant.
• Race Against the Clock: Although this trope is intended to be a central part of the film's plot, it is never properly utilized to escalate tension or generate any increasing sense of urgency as the story approaches its climax. Johnny is supposed to be facing a 24-hour deadline to remove all the computer data from his head, or else it will kill him. However, nothing is ever done to inform the viewer of how much time is remaining for Johnny to complete his task as the story plays out. Whenever anybody (or anything) refers to a specific deadline, the full 24 hours is always restated no matter how much time may have (or should have) actually passed, and after the Street Preacher is introduced roughly halfway through the movie, a given timeframe is never brought up again. (See Also: Magic Countdown)
• Rage Breaking Point: Johnny snaps after two bumbling LoTeks nearly drop an exploding car on top of him and Jane, triggering an infamous ranting monologue.
• Razor Floss: Shinji's glowing molecuwire whip, which is shown to be able to slice through flesh and bone and solid stone with minimal effort, yet, at one point, is somehow impeded by a thin, rusty chainlink gate that it can't cut through.
• Rebel Leader: J-Bone, leader of the LoTeks resistance in fighting the corporate establishment, who takes no hesitation to announce his status and reveal the LoTeks' secret base to total strangers holding him at gunpoint.
• Redemption Equals Death:
  • Takahashi is shot the very moment he balks at the opportunity to kill Johnny. In his final act before dying, he gives Johnny the second image of the download code.
  • A huge moron in the LoTeks faction, whose first key decision is to drop an exploding car on a friend's van as a "joke" (who still somehow manages to "accidentally" trip and fall on top of the drop switch after making his intentions clear), is later able to take out a single Mook with another exploding car while collapsing dead over the same switch.
• Redshirt Army: The PharmaKom defectors and their bodyguards at the Beijing Hotel are all mowed down by Shinji and his mooks. Johnny is the sole survivor of the massacre.
• The Reveal:
  • The data in Johnny's head is the cure for the global plague.
  • "Jones" is a cyborg dolphin.
  • The Electronic Ghost Woman is Johnny's mother.
• Rope Bridge: The LoTek headquarters has one, complete with rickety wooden planks that snap the second one sets a foot down on them, suspended with steel chains. Shinji corners Johnny on it, and somehow, they both end up falling through it.
• Sapient Cetaceans: Jones is revealed to be a technologically-modified super-smart dolphin, originally used by "the navy" for submarine warfare.
• Schizo Tech: Descriptive of the LoTeks' relationship with technology.
• Sharpened to a Single Atom: Shinji's molecuwire whip concealed in a prosthetic thumb tip; it sports an orange, golden glow on screen because an invisible wire whip wouldn't be interesting to look at.
• Shout-Out:
  • Before Baldy attempts to execute Johnny, he says, "Time to die"—a reference to Blade Runner.
  • In the hotel room where Johnny uploads the data into his head, there's a brief shot of Humphrey Bogart appearing in The Big Sleep, which Johnny switches off. This is in reference to Keanu Reeves' character bearing something of a resemblance to the tough, cynical personality Bogart would be best remembered for in films, particularly Rick Blaine from Casablanca. Mind, Rick Blaine is a callous character, remarking that he doesn’t “stick [his] neck out for anyone”, who, by the end of the film, rejoins the good fight against the Nazis.
  • The shot where the camera pulls back inside a train station to reveal Johnny surrounded by dozens of suffering plague victims is a very low-scale recreation of a much grander crane shot from Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett O'Hara finds the Confederate casualties of the Battle of Atlanta in a rail yard.
  • In the Japanese cut, a brief mention of the future sport Rollerball can be heard on television while Johnny is channel surfing in bed in the opening scene.
  • Scenes from Demon City Shinjuku are shown on TV during the hotel room raid.
  • Spider's lab is intended to parallel Dr. Frankenstein's, which, by extension, makes the relationship he has with Jane and the body augmentations he performed on her analogous to The Bride of Frankenstein.
  • The Everything Sensor at customs in Newark has an "eye" scanner that resembles HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • The unstoppable cyborg Street Preacher, played by Dolph Lundgren, draws parallels to Arnold Schwarzenegger's portrayal of the T-800 in The Terminator. The ending of the movie even features a subtle play on the ending of The Terminator, where the T-800's metal endoskeleton emerges from a fire and continues pursuing the protagonists. Here, the Street Preacher also leaves behind a skeleton after being set on fire, but just as the film seemingly suggests to viewers that the Street Preacher had somehow survived the blaze, a wider camera shot reveals this to actually be a subversion of expectations, and the Street Preacher is very much dead.
• Skyward Scream: Johnny's notorious "I Want Room Service" spiel.
• So Was X:
  Johnny: They'll negotiate; they're corporate.
  Jane: So is the Yakuza.
• Sold His Soul for a Donut: Implied. At one time, Johnny would have willingly given up his longterm memories (and the human growth and emotionality that would come with them) in exchange for a brain implant that obviously tethers him to nigh-permanent employment as a lowly Courier working in the Black Market. People like Johnny would be stuck in their jobs and with their minds/humanity diminished for their entire lives, unless they could somehow amass enough cash to afford a reversal "procedure," but the high, continually increasing cost would obviously be intended as a means of deterrence for couriers who would consider leaving their employers. The monetary cost of the "procedure" would essentially amount to one paying their way out of their line of work at the expense of leaving themselves flat broke. It's a real missed opportunity that this theme couldn't be explored in more detail, as Johnny's longterm memories miraculously return to him via completion of the download code, completely cheapening the gravity of his initially outlined quest.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: J-Bone vanishes while Johnny has his back turned, observing Heaven, along with the dead body of a Lo-Tek Redshirt, which J-Bone (presumably?) must have carried with him.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: Johnny is strapped to a table in the back of Ralfi's nightclub so Shinji could cut off his head.
• Stupid Evil: If PharmaKom didn't want anyone to have a cure for NAS (not even for themselves and their own families and loved ones who may be sick), then they didn't have to go through all the trouble of investing their time and resources on researching, developing, and testing an actual working cure just for the sake of needing to hide it from everybody. Alternatively, if they had already developed the cure before deciding that nobody should have it, it would have been more sensible for them to promptly destroy it and erase all their past research, instead of keeping it buried on a computer mainframe for the past year-and-a-half, before the events of the film take place, where it could potentially be discovered and leaked (Go on, guess what happens).
• Suddenly Always Knew That:
  • As Johnny calls out for various parts that he needs to assemble a VR rig, Jane, who is seemingly unfamiliar with all this technology, didn't even know what a "data courier" is supposed to be before meeting Johnny, and should know even less about the layout and organization of the warehouse storage area she and Johnny had broken into just seconds prior, is able to find and gather these products from around a storage room with ease and efficiency.
  • By the end of the film, it's revealed without any foreshadowing or prior buildup that Johnny is capable of cloning his own mental consciousness and digitally projected avatar when inside computer systems (referred to as "doubling" by J-Bone in the American edit; unexplained in other cuts of the film) to survive attacks from lethal computer viruses and protection software.
• Super-Reflexes: Jane claims to have faster reflexes, thanks to her cybernetic enhancements, but she never does anything that demonstrates this ability. Most tellingly, when Johnny and Jane are standing beneath a falling car, Jane is shown to be completely oblivious to what is happening, and Johnny is the one reacting quick enough to push Jane out of the way.
• Sweeping the Table: When Johnny and Jane break into the backroom of an electronics store, Johnny swipes a pile of junk and tools off a work table in order to clear space to assemble a VR rig using the store's products.
• Swiss Bank Account: Johnny's contacts in Beijing make a point to tell him that half of the fee Johnny is owed for transporting their data was wired in advance to a "Swiss account", as they were instructed to do.
• Switch to English: Takahashi and Shinji begin a conversation in Japanese, before Takahashi chastises Shinji for speaking "terrible" Japanese and demands Shinji talk to him in English. Towards the end of their conversation, Takahashi switches to English, as well.
• Tap on the Head: Johnny gets cold-cocked, which causes concern about potential damage to his neural implant.
• Throwing the Distraction: Johnny throws a small rock, which sends Baldy looking for him in the wrong direction.
• Toplessness from the Back: Over the course of one scene, the filmmakers make a very clear effort to draw viewers' attention to the character Jane having her chainmail top come undone and, later, outright removed while Spider administers treatment for an NAS-induced seizure, but Jane is only ever seen covering her frontside with a blanket and/or with her back turned to the camera.
• Transhuman: The cyborg street preacher. Details about this are explored more in the film's Japanese release (the "director's cut"), which includes an additional scene where this character preaches about God's plan for people to reject their organic bodies and embrace bio-mechanics and cybernetics, especially to save oneself from the NAS plague. He refers to himself as a "post-human". In the American release, the most that's hinted about these views comes in a passing reference to the name of the church that the preacher is aligned with—The Church of the Retransfiguration.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot:
  • Once Johnny makes it out of the hotel in Central Beijing, his subsequent arrival at the Newark airport on the other side of the world is practically instantaneous. The commercial plane flight alone would take about 13-and-a-half hours today and would still take over 7 hours on the Concorde that is shown, but when Johnny arrives at customs in Newark, expository dialogue still mentions the maximum 24-hour deadline for Johnny to get the data out of his head, which he uploaded in Beijing before even getting to an airport. (See Also: Magic Countdown)
  • Baldy, despite being left unconscious in a bathroom and undoubtedly leaving the Beijing Hotel well after Johnny does, is somehow still able to arrive in Newark before Johnny can even get there and lay a trap for him.
  • Inverted for Shinji and his Mooks taking an elevator from the lobby of the hotel in Beijing to the floor where Johnny and his present clients are; what would realistically be a seemingly brief moment is slowed to a crawl while concurring plot points (which are important) play out in the hotel room in their own time. It takes the entire length of time for Johnny to prepare for uploading the data (starting with when Johnny opens his briefcase containing his equipment), receive the data, and make a printout of the download code (roughly two minutes and forty-two seconds of screentime, and that's with the aid of movie editing making all of Johnny's setup move a lot faster than it actually would have) just for the elevator the bad guys are in to finally arrive on the same floor. It then takes the bad guys another minute and a half of the movie's time length (enough time for Johnny's clients to destroy the original copy of the data they gave him and for Johnny himself to regain his composure in the bathroom) to walk from the elevator to their hotel room door.
• Unusual User Interface:
  • Dedicated web surfing, for more than just phone calls, uses VR goggles and gloves that project a three-dimensional representation of the internet, manipulated by the user's hands. They even grow claws when "attacking". Taken up a notch with the Lo-Tek's scavenged VR rig, which allows for a full mental projection of the user.
  • Making an international phone call with a VR computer setup first requires reaching out and pointing to the relevant location on an unlabeled map of the entire world. Try being this accurate with Google Maps.
  • Deepfakes to conceal one's own identity through Video Phone calls are achieved by manipulating one's hand as if using a sockpuppet.
• Vapor Wear: Jane wears a chainmail shirt without a bra underneath.
• Video Phone: The story opens with the main character making a call on a video phone that also doubles as a television and an alarm clock, all of which can be operated by remote control. Another such phone shows up in the back of a future taxi cab, and the Street Preacher has one hidden in his Bible (or whatever Holy Book equivalent he has). Video phone screens are also branded with AT&T's company logo, AT&T having tried to develop such technology since the 1960's.
• Villainous Face Hold: Shinji grabs the chin of Johnny's most recent client in order to intimidate him into revealing where Johnny is going.
• Virtual Ghost: Anna Kalmann, the founder of PharmaKom. Takahashi explicitly calls her "A Ghost in the Machine."
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: The Evil Drug Company is called PharmaKom (Full company name PharmaKombinat Industrie, GmbH); it's a compound of "Pharma" (Latin for "drug") and "Kominat" (German for "combine"). On the flip side, the underground resistance fighting the corporation is the LoTeks, presumably shortened from the English words "Low" and "Technology".
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • One of Ralfi's bodyguards seemingly shifts allegiances and accompanies Shinji in chasing Johnny and Jane, after Shinji had gruesomely killed her employer, only to completely vanish from the rest of the film after the scene ends in a Mexican Standoff with the LoTeks.
  • Jane goes out of her way in the middle of a getaway chase to retrieve her "gear" that she keeps hidden in a pile of trash. Later, she mentions that this very important equipment that she needed includes a can of mace, which is not used at any later point in the narrative.
  • Inverted in another instance. After Johnny flees the hotel suite where he uploaded the data is a shot of yakuza mooks running through the hotel corridor and past what appear to be dead bodies lining the ground. We can gather from this much what had happened to these incredibly superfluous mice during the course of events that transpires when Shinji and the Yakuza raid the place... but we've still no clue as to who these dead people are, what they were originally doing in the hallway outside the hotel room, when exactly their deaths took place, who killed them, or why they were targeted by their killer(s).
• What the Hell, Hero?: Jane calls out Johnny for revealing the location of the LoTek rebellion to their enemies, pointing out the obvious that J-Bone wouldn't be too pleased about this. This detail is subsequently dropped from the narrative and never adequately followed up on.
• Withholding the Cure: It is revealed that PharmaKom is suppressing the cure for Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.
• The Worf Effect: During the film's climax, Jane and her outstanding cybernetic enhancements that supposedly make her a very great, more-than-capable fighter are outmatched and overpowered by the cyborg Street Preacher in a display of his superior strength.
• Working for a Body Upgrade:
  • The street preacher accepts contract killing offers in exchange for money so he can afford to replace his organic body parts with cybernetic ones.
  • Inverted, while Johnny's motivations are established in the opening scenes. Johnny signs on for the courier assignment in Beijing because he needs the money to have his own brain implant removed.
• Yakuza: "The most powerful of all crime syndicates," hired by "the corporations" to defend themselves from the LoTeks.
• Your Mom:
  Street Preacher: Who is "Jones"?
  Spider: He's that guy... who fucks your mother!
• Yubitsume: Implied. When we first meet Takahashi, he tells Shinji, "I see you turned your shame into an asset," implying that Shinji had to cut off the tip of his thumb to atone for a past dishonor before he replaced it with his molecuwire whip.

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