Unfairly Forgotten, Extremely R-Rated 90s Cyberpunk Action Flick Pushes Humanity To The Limit

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

Did you know there are five Nemesis movies? If that sounds overwhelming, I have some good news for you: you only need to watch the first one, and it rules. If you combine the audience approval ratings of the four sequels on Rotten Tomatoes, we’re talking about a miserable 38 percent total score between them (18 percent, 10 percent, 10 percent, and no rating, respectively). They’re that bad, and they’re not even worth talking about after this sentence. The original 1992 Nemesis, however, has no right being as fun as it is. It received a much warmer reception, landing a 71 percent critical score, and honestly, that feels about right.

Nemesis is, at times, a sloppy cyberpunk adventure, but it’s never not fun to look at. The action scenes are visually impressive, and we’re talking about that strange early ‘90s blend of practical effects, cool lasers, and robot prosthetics. There’s a clear good guy/bad guy dynamic, and our reluctant hero gets to blow lots of stuff up while uncovering a shadow government conspiracy along the way.

86.5 Percent Human

When Nemesis first introduces us to Alex Rain (Oliver Gruner), he’s an LAPD bounty hunter who’s mostly human. 86.5 percent human, to be precise. He’s enhanced with cybernetic parts, but at the end of the day, he’s still himself. While fighting the Red Army Hammerheads, a rogue militia made up of cybernetically enhanced soldiers, he’s nearly killed by their leader, Rosaria (Jennifer Gatti). Fortunately, his cohorts manage to save him by replacing even more of his damaged human parts with robotic ones.

Months later, after laying low, recovering, and eventually getting revenge on Rosaria, Alex is contacted by his old boss, Commissioner Sam Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson), for one last job. He’s given your typical zero-hour arrangement in which he has to track down his ex-lover, Jared (Marjorie Monaghan), who is believed to possess highly classified data that she plans to leak to the Hammerheads. Alex has three days to stop her before the explosive device implanted near his heart during his last round of repairs detonates.

From this point forward, Nemesis leans fully into action spectacle, giving us an all-out war between humans, cyborgs, cybernetically enhanced mercenaries like Alex, and a new generation of advanced robots with synthetic bodies and implanted human memories. They look human, but underneath it all, they’re soulless clankers disguised as people.

Along the way, Alex begrudgingly teams up with Max Impact (Merle Kennedy), who has a serious chip on her shoulder because Rosaria was her sister, and Alex killed her during the film’s opening act. Despite their differences, they share a common goal: tracking down Farnsworth, who appears to be orchestrating an all-out war between humans and machines while using Alex as a pawn to navigate the chaos. But there are also hints that the version of Farnsworth they’re dealing with may not actually be the real Farnsworth at all.

Strap In And Enjoy The Ride

On its face, Nemesis is your typical low-budget cyberpunk sci-fi action flick. It earned around $2 million at the box office during its original run, which most sources seem to classify as roughly break-even territory, though the exact financials remain murky online. If reports about the film’s $2 million production budget are accurate, then director Albert Pyun absolutely stretched every dollar because this movie looks fantastic for its era. Watching it in 2026, I was genuinely blown away by some of the practical effects, especially the shots involving cybernetic humans getting their faces blown off and exposing the robotic circuitry underneath their fleshy outer coating.

Countless rounds are fired, explosions erupt constantly, and Nemesis delivers enough chaos to keep even the most ravenous action fans entertained from start to finish. The violence and stunt coordination are top notch, and whatever Nemesis lacks from a storytelling perspective is more than compensated for by the sheer volume of all-consuming action sequences packed into the runtime. Even then, it’s not like the story is terrible or anything. It simply mirrors familiar ideas we’ve seen before involving the half-human, half-machine concept popularized by films like The Terminator and Cyborg, the latter also directed by Albert Pyun.

Still, Nemesis stands on its own despite leaning into familiar genre trappings, and it’s ridiculously fun to watch unfold. At the end of the day, it’s a beyond-solid B movie that any sci-fi fan with a love for grimy cyberpunk aesthetics can appreciate. Just stay away from the sequels because this franchise falls off hard right when it thinks it’s getting started.

As of this writing, you can stream Nemesis for free on Tubi.