Virtuosity (1995)

A virtual reality simulation becoming sentient, breaking out of a computer system and wreaking havoc on society doesn't seem anywhere near as far fetched as it might have done nearly thirty years ago when Brett Leonard's Sci-Fi was first released. Starring Denzel Washington as a former police officer Parker Barnes and Russell Crowe as SID 6.7, the virtual reality simulation mentioned above, Leonard's film aims to sit alongside James Cameron's first two Terminator films (1984-1991) but predictably falls way short.

The opening sequence of a virtual reality training simulation sets the film up rather well, with Barnes testing the system having fallen rather badly from grace and now incarcerated for accidentally killing two citizens whilst taking down a political terrorist. Barnes is helping the authorities in testing the system from jail, and as you may have already guessed, is offered a pardon for his sins in exchange for taking down SID 6.7 who escapes his technological prison and starts terrorizing the real world.

Virtuosity might have worked better if it had an original source to be working from; Philip K. Dick hangs heavy over proceedings in the sense that it sometimes feels like this could be a poor adaptation of a Dick story. Other films that come to mind are Minority Report (2002) [a Dick adaptation] but perhaps more pertinently Peter Howitt's Antitrust (2001), a techno thriller that came several years after Virtuosity and successfully hits its goals in ways that Virtuosity fails to do.

It doesn't help that Crowe is having a great time as a computer programme but doing it pretty terribly; this performance reminds you have just how bad he can sometimes be. For the record I'm a big Russell Crowe fan, but now and again he throws in the odd absolute stinker. This display can be parked alongside his crimes against the cockney accent in 2017's abysmal Mummy reboot.

Thankfully Virtuosity is nowhere near as bad as that particular blaspheme against cinema, but neither is it particularly good either, badly squandering a potentially interesting set up. 5.4./10