1995–1998: Career fluctuations
I do love it [Shakespeare]. It’s like this kind of code that once you start to inhabit it with breath and sound and feeling and thought, it is the most powerful and consuming and freeing at the same time. Just, literally, elemental in sound, consonants and vowels. What I found out in doing it [Hamlet] was that it brought up for me all the anger that was inside me for my mother. I mean, it surprised me, just what was there, and I hadn’t seen that before.
— Reeves on his Hamlet performance[24]
Reeves’s next leading role came in the 1995 cyberpunk action thriller Johnny Mnemonic, directed by artist Robert Longo and based on the 1981 short story by William Gibson. Set in 2021, it is about a man who has a cybernetic brain implant and must deliver a data package before he dies or is killed by the yakuza. The film received mainly negative reviews and critics felt Reeves was “woefully miscast”.[73] Roger Ebert opined that the film is one of the “great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn’t deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.”[74] He next appeared in the romantic drama A Walk in the Clouds, which also garnered mixed-to-negative reviews.[75] Reeves plays a young soldier returning home from World War II, trying to settle down with a woman he married impulsively just before he enlisted. Film critic Mick LaSalle opined that “A Walk in the Clouds is for the most part a beautiful, well-acted and emotionally rich picture”, whereas Hal Hinson from The Washington Post said, “The film has the syrupy, Kodak magic-moment look of a Bo Derek movie, and pretty much the same level of substance”.[76][77]
