Behold the Power of VR!

Traditionally I’d start one of these reviews discussing a bit of background on the movie, how it relates to its source material, how it fits into the overall bibliography of its author. None of that really works for The Lawnmower Man, though, because this film isn’t really an adaptation of Stephen King’s source story. Yes, it shares a name with his short story (originally published in 1975 and then collected later in Night Shift), but it ditches everything about the story barring the fact that, at some point, someone mows lawns. Outside of that, the two works couldn’t be further apart.

That’s by design as the creative team on the film, backed by production company Allied Vision, tossed King’s story and rewrote an already existing script, CyberGod, into an “adaptation”. Needless to say, King wasn’t pleased that his story was essentially ignored for a film that had nothing to do with his work. The movie was marketed as “Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man”, so King sued to have his name taken off the work, and then won. He was free to badmouth the movie all he wanted without any fear that it would tarnish his own writing reputation.

And right he was to do so because this film is an absolute dog. The film has a threadbare plot that, honestly, makes absolutely no sense. It barely functioned back in 1992 (the year it came out), with its insistence that VR was the wave of the future and would come to redefine man. It works even worse now, in 2025, where VR is a dumb, overpriced novelty that let’s people play cruddy games and watch 3D porn. It’s a bad movie with bad ideas that couldn’t even muster the ability to be scary.

And yet, despite that, it did feature then-cutting-edge CGI graphics. Audiences flocked to it, making it a smash hit that brought in $150 Mil upon release. That just makes me feel so sad.

Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey) is a simple man with the mind of a child. A ward of the local church, he spends his days looking at comic books (he enjoys the pictures since he can’t read) and helping mow lawns around town. A chance encounter at his shack behind the church with a cybernetically enhanced chimp, though, puts his life on a different course. That chimp had been the project of Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan), a scientist using VR tech to enhance the brains of animals to, per his contract with the CIA, turn them into soldiers. The chimp escapes, the CIA puts it down, and Angelo puts aside his work, falling into a deep depression.

He only comes out of it when he sees Jobe mowing his lawn and he realizes that he just might be able to make Jobe smarter. He invites Jobe to his house to play his “games”, VR training simulators and 3D flight games, while he pumps Jobe full of a cocktail of vitamins and other chemicals. Suddenly Jobe starts getting smarter, a lot smarter. He becomes a genius that surpasses Angelo. But when the CIA changes the formula of the drug cocktail Jobe is on, putting him on a mix that sent the chimp into a fit of anger, Jobe turns evil. He develops psychic powers, gets hooked on VR, and starts preaching that he could rule the world from within the VR cyberspace. As Jobe goes on a rampage, killing people with his new VR powers, Dr. Angelo realizes that Job has to be stopped, whatever the cost.

The start of the film (especially the theatrical cut and not the longer, and far more tedious, director’s cut) is at least promising. As silly as the concept of using VR to make someone smarter might be, there’s genuine hope and emotion felt in watching Jobe go from a man with the intelligence of a small child into someone that is well developed, mature, and able to take care of himself. The story is told from Dr. Angelo’s perspective primarily, with the good doctor being our protagonist, but the emotional journey is really Jobe’s.

If the story stuck to this plotline alone it would work. It’s got an interesting Flowers for Algernon vibe, with a man coming into his own via increased intelligence and abilities. The first two acts are interesting, involving you in the life of Jobe and getting you to root for him as he finds himself. Sure, there’s a thread of doubt, of worry that maybe he’s progressing too fast, developing abilities he can’t understand, but you still want to see him succeed and become the person, perhaps, he was meant to be.

The issue comes when the film remembers, “oh yeah, this is supposed to be a horror film.” In a turn not entirely unlike Carrie, Jobe eventually becomes so powerful that he reaches a breaking point and goes off the deep end. Unlike with Carrie, where the girl gets pushed too far by bullies and snaps, Jobe simply achieves absolute power and corrupts himself absolutely. Sure, the blame can reside on the CIA for pumping him full of a drug cocktail that increases his anger and aggression, but in a different film we would maintain Jobe as a generally good person and he’d find a way to fight past the drugs and restore himself on the righteous path.

That’s not what happens here. Jobe simply goes even and decides to conquer the cyberworld. And this is where the film really begins to suck. While Jobe is learning and growing, playing silly VR games, we don’t mind that the CGI is kind of cruddy and not very interesting. Sure, it was cutting edge in 1992 when it came out, but Jurassic Park came out only a year later, in 1993, and redefined what good special effects looked like. What was once cutting edge in The Lawnmower Man quickly looked like garbage, and without the eye candy special effects to distract you, all you’re left with is a hollow and silly movie that fails to understand its characters, its villains, or its own story.

To be clear, The Lawnmower Man is not scary. Even in 1992 the effects looked a little goofy, and the plot is absolutely nonsensical. Jobe is somehow able to take his cyberspace abilities and apply them out in the real world, turning people into cyber-balls and summoning cyber-bees to attack his foes. It all looks really bad, and that’s not even touching on how awful the climax, which takes place entirely within cyberspace, looks. It’s a blocky, shiny, awfully textured mess that fails to deliver tension or scares. It’s just bad.

And all of this is for a film that barely understands its own story. Jobe should be the hero of the tale, not Dr. Angelo. He should be fighting to maintain himself, to be the good person he always was. Instead the film decides to take a sweet-natured guy and turn him into the villain. It’s not a story of redemption, it’s a story of failure. The CIA essentially gets away with their mistakes, with the higher-ups barely seeing any punishment. Dr. Angelo finds a family to love him (which is a plotline barely touched on in either version of the film). Jobe gets stuck in cyberspace and maybe becomes an evil god. No lessons are learned, nothing is gained, no fun is had.

So yes, The Lawnmower Man is a bad movie and Stephen King was right to take his name off of it. It was successful at the time because of its cutting-edge graphics, but it was quickly forgotten and then ignored soon after. Its sequel, The Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War (or Beyond Cyberspace depending on the release you watch) is a terrible film that bombed at the Box Office, and then everyone realized both films were trash and never discussed them again. It’s for the best.