Glass Shadow pays minimal lip service to the first film – it is set vaguely in the same future, although the society portrayed appears much less devastated than in the first film; and we get one or two seconds of clips from the original shown on a tv screen at one point. What Glass Shadow also does is to abandon the mindless kickboxing chop suey of the original – it keeps the basic cyborg theme to justify the title but reconstructs the rest into a reasonable Cyberpunk film. Nobody is ever going to mistake Cyborg²: Glass Shadow for a great work of art or even an unrecognised classic, nevertheless it marshals its Cyberpunk tropes into a reasonable plot and with a fair degree of intelligence.

There is some fine effects work – notably a beautifully detailed model city and one excellent sequence over the credits where we see the transparent cyborg being filled with the plastic explosive. And even when the low-budget shows through, director Michael Schroeder rides over it with a maximum degree of rundown moodily lit dark future atmosphere that more than disguises any rough edges. Elias Koteas plays with a likeably wry sense of humour, although Angelina Jolie (well before the days she became a major A-list superstar) makes almost no distinction at all in the role of the cyborg. The final image the film goes out on of the geriatric hero sitting on a porch being tended by the unaged cyborg is a superbly poetic coda to the film.