Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe Entered Cyberspace

30 years ago, Hollywood was all about the cyber. So much cyber! Throughout the year, computer and internet paranoia took shape with movies like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net, Hackers, Strange Days, and Virtuosity, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary. “Celebrated” is probably too strong a word; while The Net was the only real hit among these movies, Hackers became a late-period VHS favorite, and Strange Days has been belatedly acclaimed as one of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best. Virtuosity, by contrast, hasn’t accumulated many partisans – though it does seem to have some defenders on, appropriately enough, the internet, where the mere presence of a younger Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, plus a blast of demented energy, is good for more than a few “this cooks, actually” short-form reclamations.

But does it cook, actually? It’s certainly on the sleazier end of Washington’s near-endless supply of cop thrillers, basically his own variation on Demolition Man. He plays Parker Barnes, an ex-cop in very slightly futuristic Los Angeles (think a more chill Predator 2) who has been imprisoned for the accidental killing of two reporters while exacting revenge on a terrorist who killed his family. (He also has a metal arm as a result of this incident, something that weirdly doesn’t much come into play after it’s revealed.) Barnes also serves as a tester for a virtual-reality training program whose Big Bad is an ill-advised amalgam of hundreds of real-life killers, called SID, embodied by a young and deliciously hammy Russell Crowe. Naturally, SID eventually escapes his computerized confines, takes control of a synthetic (and regenerative) body, and goes on a murderous rampage. Barnes is offered a full pardon to stop him. Could you imagine that maybe SID’s programming includes the madman who killed Barnes’ wife and daughter?

Demolition Man‘s version of this premise – badass cop unleashed to stop killer with outsized showmanship – is treated with a satirical wink and a libertarian bent. Virtuosity is grimmer at every turn: the dead wife and kid, another child imperiled for the climax, plenty of nasty murders at the hands of SID. It’s one of those movies that doesn’t really have action set pieces where characters fight or chase each other so much as sequences of violence, where the point is all the harm.

Yet the movie isn’t entirely serious, either, because Crowe is self-evidently having the most fun playing this composite killer, strutting around in a series of brightly colored suits like he’s looking for a Gotham City to destroy. Despite his derivative nature (one of his struts is set “Stayin’ Alive,” a musty 20th anniversary Saturday Night Fever reference), SID quickly carves out his own identity in the real world. The movie’s cleverest idea is also arguably its lowest-tech (or maybe second-lowest-tech, after the terrorist-revenge business): Because SID is a creature of interactivity, he craves attention, feedback, some kind of opponent or playmate.

That’s not particularly unusual for a madman in a thriller – as Charlie Kaufman says in Adaptation, “see every cop ever made for other examples of this” – but it does presage the negative feedback loop of the internet, where bad actors say and sometimes do horrible things to strangers because of the dopamine hit. Being a bad person becomes gamified. SID is also a form of artificial intelligence, though of course the uncanny but nonsensical simulation of humanity we might recognize from today’s encroaching A.I. doesn’t usually enter into sci-fi movies, where there isn’t much drama unless the A.I. character can become some sort of credible life form. Anyway, the movie isn’t that concerned with A.I.; it pitches itself as more about virtual reality, despite the obvious threat being the consciousness itself, not its home.

Director Brett Leonard was Hollywood’s de facto VR expert at the time, having directed the low-budget hit The Lawnmower Man five years earlier. (He had another film, the little-seen Jeff Goldblum thriller Hideaway, out earlier in 1995; its 30th came and went without a peep.) Virtuosity recycles a little bit of Lawnmower Man imagery towards the end, when Barnes gets briefly trapped inside SID’s program as part of a bid to bring the killer back into the digital “box.” But most of the movie blends the live-action and virtual worlds less ostentatiously – when Barnes trains in the program early on, it looks like a glitchier version of reality – in a way that probably saved some visual effects money but also does anticipate the “virtual” world in a movie like The Matrix, where plentiful digital effects create more of an augmented reality than one of those cheesy Disclosure-style computer-scapes.

Virtuosity is not as good as The Matrix, or Strange Days. It might not even be as good as The Lawnmower Man, though it benefits mightily from the presence of Washington’s undefeated gravitas and Crowe’s showstopping villainy. Good as they are, the stars and a supporting cast dotted with strong character actors also keep the movie firmly within the realm of cop thriller; it’s not out to truly bend minds or make anyone question the very nature of reality. Sci-fi still struggles with how to treat this tech today. Though immersive digital experiences and artificial intelligence are less remote to the average viewer than they were in 1995, that watershed year for (perhaps premature) internet-related sci-fi movies isn’t inspiring many filmmakers to strap those helmets back on to either glorify or vilify tech that turns out to be used mainly for customer service chat bots and horrible imitations of art. Even cautionary tales inspire a different kind of caution when a bunch of tech thrillers tank at the box office. Something else Virtuosity gets right, maybe accidentally: We continue to use wildly advanced technology to make the same dumb mistakes, in stories and in life.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.