Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Virtuosity Blu-ray Movie Review

Avatars Have More Fun

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 7, 2015

The 1995 sci-fi thriller Virtuosity had the star wattage of Denzel Washington and a rising newcomer named Russell Crowe. The effects-laden trailer looked enticing, but the film was DOA in theaters, and time hasn't been kind to it. Director Brett Leonard had made the 1992 cult classic, The Lawnmower Man, which revolved around the transformation of a mentally challenged man into a digital superbeing. Virtuosity must have seemed like a logical next step, as the evolving world of virtual reality spawned an entirely computer-generated character who manages to enter our world and treat it as a homicidal playground.

The problem is that this concept had been done before (and better) by James Cameron. In his two Terminator films, Cameron let loose various thinking machines to run riot in a Los Angeles whose buildings and people they destroyed without a moment's hesitation. Even the humans trying to stop these cyborgs regarded the urban landscape as a disposable war zone, because they knew what others didn't, namely that everything around them would vanish in a nuclear holocaust just a few years into the future. For everyone involved, both persons and property were as temporary as pixels on a screen. Virtuosity's computer-generated character didn't behave any differently, and he wasn't especially original about it.

Leonard and screenwriter Eric Bernt (Romeo Must Die) got things backwards. Their story moved from virtual reality to the outside world, when the more fertile direction was precisely the opposite. Four years later, the Wachowskis would plunge us into The Matrix, where reality could be reshaped, humans interacted through their avatars, and you never knew for sure whether you were talking to a person or a program. Leaving aside the problematic sequels, The Matrix hit the conceptual targets at which Virtuosity aimed and missed.

A common criticism of effects-heavy movies is that they ignore character and story, because the director and his team are so focused on the visuals. Virtuosity has the reverse problem. Its script is so laden with exposition and backstory, so burdened with extraneous characters, that the effects are almost a distraction. This is what happens when you take what amounts to a garden-variety police procedural and then try to insert a walking computer program as your villian-in-chief. Instead of having fun with the idea, you end up spending half the movie explaining it.

In an unspecified but not-too-distant future, former LAPD Lt. Parker Barnes (Washington) is serving a lengthy prison term for murder arising from his relentless pursuit of a political terrorist named Matthew Grimes (Christopher Murray). The specifics of how the Grimes case resulted in Parker's imprisonment are only gradually revealed, but we learn early on that Grimes is dead and that Parker's pursuit of him cost the lives of the detective's wife and daughter.

Parker's friend, Police Chief Billy Cochran (William Forsythe), has gotten him enrolled in an experimental program by LETAC, the Law Enforcement Technology Advancement Center, which is developing software to train police officers in virtual reality. The project is dear to the heart of Police Commissioner Elizabeth Deane (Louise Fletcher) and a potential gold mine for the company's owner, William Wallace (William Fichtner). The head programmer, Dr. Darrel Lindenmeyer (Stephen Spinella), has created a suitably devious criminal adversary for trainees to apprehend. Lindenmeyer calls him SID 6.7 (Crowe), and unbeknownst to the police chief or commissioner, SID has been minted from an amalgam of over a hundred serial killers and mass murderers, including such luminaries as Ted Bundy, Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein and, of course, Matthew Grimes.

Parker and other prisoners are being used as guinea pigs to shake out the bugs in the system before it goes live, but when SID manages to kill a prisoner named Donovan (Costas Mandylor) during a simulation, despite the built-in safeties, the commissioner orders the program shut down. That's when Lindenmeyer switches into full mad scientist mode and dupes a colleague, Dr. Clyde Reilly (Kevin J. O'Connor), into introducing SID to Reilly's experimental nano-technology. This gives SID an android body to enter the real world, where he immediately begins entertaining himself with murder and mayhem. Eager to capture SID as quickly as possible, Commissioner Deane offers Parker a pardon in exchange for hunting him down. Parker is "partnered", if you can call it that, with a criminal psychologist, Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), a single mom whose precocious daughter, Karin, is the first person in the film to get Parker to crack a smile. (Karin is played, in her film debut, by Kaley Cuoco, future star of The Big Bang Theory.)

Crowe is by far the best thing in Virtuosity, as he makes the most out of SID's sheer delight in instilling fear, causing mayhem and snuffing out life. Unfortunately, he's limited by a script that doesn't give SID anything truly interesting to do. "You have no idea what you're up against", Dr. Lindenmeyer says to the authorities, but the same could be said of the filmmakers when it came to imagining SID's crimes. From a super-criminal of SID's provenance, one would expect schemes that are twisted and extraordinary, but what do we get? He takes over a disco and makes the patrons scream before killing them. He commandeers a TV station and has the audience phone in votes on whether he should kill someone. Even Freddy Krueger could have come up with something more original, and he only had the DNA of plebian lunatics, not the Social Register of psychos that Lindenmeyer used to grow SID.

The same mental dullness afflicts the forces of law and order. They go to the trouble of getting Parker out of prison, but then neglect to inform the rest of the LAPD that their fugitive isn't made of flesh and blood and won't react normally to bullets. (SID can regenerate his tissue from ordinary glass.) The result, predictably, is numerous dead cops. And the entire force is too quick to turn on Parker when SID frames his adversary for murder. With SID holding hostages in a fortified position, Parker's fellow cops focus on him the kind of massive firepower they should be aiming at the real threat. As for Dr. Carter, what can one say about a criminal psychologist who has studied the case histories of SID's constituents, but never even considers that her daughter might belong in protective custody, given the penchant of SID's many progenitors, including Matthew Grimes, for targeting family members of those hunting him?

People often do stupid things in life, but movies, especially genre movies, aren't real life. They're fictional constructs built for entertainment, and if they aren't well-constructed, they don't entertain. Too much of Virtuosity depends on having scientists and law enforcement personnel who have been smart enough to develop SID and the VR training program suddenly start acting like idiots. The film also tosses out random plot elements that it doesn't know how to use, such as the fail-safe capsule injected into Parker's head (shades of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York), a threat that is eliminated in such a lazy fashion that there's no satisfaction in the payoff. The whole movie is disappointing that way. Even Crowe and Washington can't save it.

Virtuosity Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Virtuosity was shot by British DP Gale Tattersall (From the Earth to the Moon). Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been taken from a Paramount transfer and master with which Warner had no involvement in the preparation. The future in Virtuosity looks almost antiseptically cool and uniform, even inside the prison where Parker is serving his time. The VR simulations are filled with businesspeople in gray walking through a landscape of steel and glass, and the world outside isn't much different. SID, by contrast, is attracted to more colorful locations, whether it's the Japanese restaurant in the simulation of the opening scene or the real-world disco with its elaborate light show where he takes the clientele hostage. He also likes flashy clothing. The Blu-ray image nicely balances these various palettes, and it also manages the transitions between the sharp, flat present and the softer, darker, distorted memory images that torment Parker as he recalls his family's fate at the hands of Matthew Grimes. Except for those portions, which are deliberately blurred, the Blu-ray image is clear and sharply detailed, and the film's grain pattern is finely resolved, with a touch of sharpening visible from time to time.

Virtuosity has been mastered on a BD-50 with an average bitrate of 33.97 Mbps. This is a departure for Warner, which has too often compressed films of this length (106 minutes) to a smaller file size in order to fit them onto BD-25s. With any luck, Virtuosity's generous compression represents the beginning of a trend that Warner will continue.

Virtuosity Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Virtuosity's 5.1 track, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, gets off to a great start in the opening VR sequence as Parker and Donovan dash through a simulation, and we experience it from their perspective, with voices of the crowd surrounding and passing by them. The ensuing shootout with SID 6.7 is a sonically active affair, with bullets flying, dishes breaking and Japanese-style paper walls ripping apart. Subsequent encounters between SID and his pursuers are just as aggressively mixed, as are Parker's various struggles with the many adversaries he must face, both in and out of prison. (A showdown with a white supremacist while prisoners cheer all around is memorably immersive.) The sound designers have created an interesting and distinctive combination of electrical and organic noise for SID's regenerative process, which is impressively conveyed by the Blu-ray's track.

Dialogue is always clear, and the score by the versatile Christopher Young (Drag Me to Hell) covers a broad range from standard action movie beats to a kind of parody of early video game music.

Virtuosity Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No extras are included. Paramount's 1999 DVD of Virtuosity included a trailer, but the studio did not provide Warner with even that minimal extra.

Virtuosity Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As critical as I am of Virtuosity, I still find it a guilty pleasure, partly for Russell Crowe's no-holds-barred performance as SID and partly because it's fascinating to observe such a wrongheaded conception of the digital future. Compared to the tiny devices by which millions of individuals now connect to massive computing and information resources during every hour of the day, the huge consoles of LETAC look as clunky and outdated as a room-size IBM mainframe spinning reels of tape. Virtuosity's focus on the externalization of SID 6.7 missed what was most interesting about him. "I'm a fifty terrabyte, self-evolving, neural network, double backflip off the high platform", he tells his creator. The single biggest laugh in the theater occurred when Commissioner Deane asked just what SID was evolving into, followed by a cut to a famous pop culture reference. If director Leonard and writer Bernt had kept asking themselves the same question, and pushing themselves to find more imaginative answers, Virtuosity would have been a better film. As a bare-bones Blu-ray presentation, Warner's disc is fine. The film is intermittently amusing but otherwise forgettable.