One Cyberpunk Sequel Was The Weirdest Stephen King Reboot Ever
Don't have the original cast? No problem.
In 1992, the original Lawnmower Man was way ahead of its time. Loosely based on the Stephen King short story of the same name, the cyberpunk film turned a neurodivergent gardener into a kind of pre-Matrix badass in a virtual world. Starring Jeff Fahey as Jobe and Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Lawrence Angelo, The Lawnmower Man was a haunting, bizarre sci-fi horror movie, which is utterly unlike anything else in cinema history. Well, at least that was true until January 12, 1996, when the film’s sequel, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, hit theaters and attempted to utterly reboot the concept with an almost entirely new cast.
Looking back three decades later, it's not so much that Lawnmower Man 2 tarnished the legacy of the original film; it's that on paper, some of the audacious retooling of the concept could have worked. Because one of the greatest strengths of the sequels is that having Matt Frewer play Jobe was, if you squint, an upgrade.
Taking place a number of years after the first film, Lawnmower Man 2 uses a group of hacker teens, utterly unconnected to events from the first film, as a plot device to reenter the twisted cyberspace world created by Dr. Lawrence Angelo (now played by Patrick Bergin), and inhabited by a digital version of Jobe (now embodied by Matt Frewer).
Why was Frewer such an interesting choice to bring into the paranoid VR world of The Lawnmower Man? Well, because in some ways, Frewer’s visage pioneered modern pop culture notions of digital personalities. The metafictional AI character “Max Headroom” was played by Frewer in his various incarnations, including, most famously, a faux-talk show style series, as well as a drama series called Max Headroom, in which the quirky digital character advised ordinary humans throughout a variety of capers and mysteries.
So putting Frewer in the role of the disturbed, and disturbing character of Jobe for Lawnmower Man 2 was a bit meta: Here’s an actor already known for playing a digital cyberspace character, but now here he is again, but this time basically an outright villain. In a sense, Matt Frewer playing Jobe in Lawnmower Man 2 is like the 1990s version of Andy Serkis taking on the role of Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboots, after he was famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.
The “real” Jobe (Matt Frewer) in Lawnmower Man 2.
That said, despite the stunt casting of Frewer as a more menacing, and frankly, sicko, version of Jobe, Lawnmower Man 2 fails not because it's a sequel with most of the original cast absent, but because the plot is nonsensical in the extreme. The cyber-Macguffin of the film is something called the Chiron Chip, which is kind of like a master control hack of all computers on Earth. Interestingly, the original Lawnmower Man lacked this kind of Bond villain world-domination plot, which is part of the reason why Lawnmower Man 2 doesn’t feel like the original film at all. Had Frewer been allowed to play Jobe with fewer cliché motivations, the film could have worked. But, as it stands, in this film, Jobe isn’t that different from the evil Jeff Bridges avatar, CLU 2, from Tron: Legacy; semi-digital baddie wants to destroy the world.
Because the character of Jobe is neurodivergent, Lawnmower Man 2 is also guilty of quite a bit of ableism, especially through a 2026 lens. These facts don’t make the film outright unwatchable today, but it is disturbing how much the film casually conflates neurodivergent people with outright evil. Again, Frewer does his best to inject some nuance into this role, but it's a far cry from the coolness of Max Headroom or the originality of the first film.
Jobe, is that really you?
Should you watch Lawnmower Man 2 today? The answer is a qualified maybe. If you need to see how small, would-be sci-fi franchises tried to stay alive in the 1990s, there’s certainly a history lesson here. If you want to see a decent, vintage cyberpunk movie, certainly, look somewhere else.
