Well, this one's aged a little, but it's still fun. Produced in 1995 by Brett Leonard, the film deals with the idea of a virtual police training simulation featuring a criminal mastermind program, SID 6.7, played by Russell Crowe. Along the way, SID is helped into an nanotech body and out into the real world. Denzel Washington plays Parker Barnes, the police officer assigned to capture SID. Things progress as you might expect; the plot can hardly be considered complicated - this is more a straightforward storytelling ride rather than a twist and turn filled exploration.
The nineties' ideas of virtual reality and how it might advance is in great evidence here. The Lawnmower Man had, in 1992, introduced director Brett Leonard's idea of cyberspace to the general film-watching public, and used cutting-edge computer graphics to represent this electronic space. The theme of The Lawnmower Man is broadly similar, as well, concerning the interactions between virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the real world. Cybersex gets a brief look in, as well, though more as a plot device in Virtuosity rather than the gratuitous eye candy of The Lawnmower Man. However, while the virtual world of The Lawnmower Man is clearly computer generated - all shiny surfaces, ray-tracing and polygons - the virtual world of Virtuosity is more akin to that of The Matrix, although with audio and visual glitches to distance it from the real-world. (The progression in the depiction of the virtual world is interesting to watch as we progress from The Lawnmower Man through films like Disclosure, Virtuosity, and on to more recent films, such as The Matrix. It's well worth noding, if anyone's up for it...)
The SID program is also interesting. We're told that SID is a 'virtual reality entity', a 50-terabyte self-evolving entity which features an amalgamation of 183 criminal personalities. The idea that this entity, created in the virtual world, might somehow make its way into the real world is interesting, but hardly original. In 1993, Star Trek: The Next Generation features the episode Ship In A Bottle, in which the character of Professory Moriarty, created by Data as an appropriate challenge for his intellect, manages to exit the holodeck (Star Trek's equivalent of virtual reality) and take over the ship.
So, despite a promising premise, it seems the events of Virtuosity are entirely unoriginal. That doesn't make it a bad film; there's plenty to entertain. It has its inexplicable moments - the prison fight between Parker Barnes and a white supremacist seems utterly pointless, but then Russell Crowe is on form as the villain, a role which actually suits his smug style of acting. The nightclub scene, in which he samples various victims whimpering, crying and... well, dying... and then plays them back is odd, but prefaces the Diva Dance from Luc Besson's The Fifth Element perfectly. And if nothing else, the mid-nineties computer graphics are an entertaining walk down memory lane.
Released: 1995
Director: Brett Leonard
Genre: Sci-Fi
Starring:
Russell Crowe as SID 6.7
Denzel Washington as Lt. Parker Barnes
and Kelly Lynch as Madison Carter