Virtuosity (1995)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I suspect that both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe would consider Virtuosity to be one of their early shames. At times, the film does stink of mid-1990s funk and silliness, what with its then-spectacular-now-terrible computer graphics, fascination for virtual reality and careless overuse of such SF tropes as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. At its heart, it’s nothing more than a cop-versus-criminal-nemesis chase dressed up in near-future plot refinements—it should work better as a crime thriller than a serious extrapolative work, except that what keeps it interesting are the SF plot devices, as half-heartedly developed as they are. (Circa-2019 viewers will be struck as how many of Virtuosity’s plot devices would also be covered in Westworld’s first two seasons, including a solid-state storage device for artificial intelligences and recreating virtual simulation to interrogate said AIs.)  Of course, what was gosh-wow for mainstream viewers back in 1995 is old hat to a far more technologically savvy 2010s audience. Still, there’s a certain inadvertent charm to see how the era then portrayed the future—shared with such Virtuosity contemporaries at The Net and Hackers, or to director Brett Leonard’s own The Lawnmower Man. Extrapolation aside, the film itself is an uneven suspense thriller—director Leonard occasionally finds ways to keep his action sequences moving, most notably through the use of helicopters in the rooftop finale. Still, perhaps the thing that most will remember from the film is the acting—Washington’s stoicism returns full force after a bit of an unusual prologue, while Crowe snacks on the scenery as an exuberant villain-of-villains with superpowers—and a (badly executed) musical fixation that partially explains the film’s title. In the background, William Fichtner is instantly recognizable, whereas only committed Kaley Cuoco fans will identify her in a child role performance. The ending has the unfortunate distinction of dragging on for an added ten minutes after the climax between the two protagonists—a more skillful screenwriter (or a film more resistant to the lead actor’s script tampering, as documented in an interview with Kelly Lynch) would have restructured that last half-hour to end on a higher note and effectively rearrange its best ideas. Virtuosity is not really a good movie, but let’s not try to pretend that it’s now without some interest even in the ways it now looks ridiculous. (After all: you needed to explain emoticons in 1995 because it was still obscure to older people. You still need to explain it in 2019 is because it’s obscure to younger people raised on emojis.)