Secretly Awesome - Virtuosity

Release Date: August 4, 1995

Director: Brett Leonard

Writer: Eric Bernt

Cast: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Kelly Lynch, William Fichtner, Louise Fletcher, William Forsythe

Box Office: $24,047,675

Rotten Tomatoes: 34%

Buy it!

What better way to start of this series than with Denzel Washington himself? 90s Cyberpunk doesn't get much better, or much worse than Brett Leonard's Virtuosity. Okay, it probably gets a lot worse, but not while maintaining such a high level of enjoyability.

The plot of Virtuosity is nonsensical at best, though it is the best kind of nonsensical, revolving around a computer training program for police to track down serial killers that is given corporeal form and set loose on a killing rampage around L.A. Fittingly crude CGI effects involving Russell Crowe's limbs regenerating when he touches glass, silly demonstrations of predicted futuristic technology, and a mess of hokey computer interfaces are just a few of the wonderful things you'll find in this film. And that's not even mentioning the symphony of human screams scene, in which Crowe's Sid 6.7 terrorizes a nightclub and tries to orchestrate screams into music. It's twisted and bizarre, and played with a wink, as pretty much all of Crowe's scenes are.

People might just see a lot of this movie as being so bad that it's good, and they wouldn't be totally wrong; but it's also just a brilliantly strange film, and I always love to see a fully-realized Hollywood production of something that is this bizarre. That said, the one thing that is genuinely great, and the reason Virtuosity deserves to be called "secretly awesome" is Russell Crowe, who turns in what had to have been one of the most enjoyable performances of 1995. It needs to be added to the cannon of the the all-time great over-the-top screen performances. Sid 6.7 is an attention-craving, cocky cyber-bully synthesized from the personalities of two-hundred notorious serial killers, who goes on a creative kill-spree in L.A. And Crowe just feeds off of the ridiculousness of it, playing Sid with a swagger and a gorgeous comically demonic laugh. It's beautiful to watch. As for Denzel... well, he pretty much phones it in. But even a phoned-in Denzel can be entertaining. According to the imdb trivia page, he accepted the role because his son asked him to. But honestly, Crowe more than makes up for it.

In addition to Denzel and Crowe, Virtuosity also boasts a nice supporting cast, which includes Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and William Forsythe, who gives the greatest delivery of "Anybody using this chair?" you could ever imagine. Seriously. And Virtuosity ends how all 90s action-thrillers should... with the good guy squaring off against the bad guy in a random, inaccessible-under-normal-circumstances location. In this case, on the rooftop heating combines of a skyscraper which houses the television station in which Sid 6.7 is broadcasting live murders to the world.

Brett Leonard also directed The Lawnmower Man, another 90s techno-thriller and surely a candidate for a future post, as soon as I can track down a copy of the out-of-print DVD. But for now, Virtuosity will definitely suffice.

The Book of Eli - *

A drifter blows into town and causes all sorts of havoc in The Book of Eli. It's a pretty old story and has been given much better treatment from many better films in the past, but Eli twists it, making it an apocalyptic western with religious themes. Eli is a man of faith who has been walking around with a machete for fifteen years looking for something God told him he would find but when his iPod battery runs out, he needs to go into town to get it charged and starts some shit with the locals. Mayhem ensues.

The film opens pretty well, although perhaps my judgement was clouded by my love for directors the Hughes Brothers, who are responsible for Menace II Society and the criminally underrated Dead Presidents. Whether it was ever actually good or not doesn't really matter, because by the thirty minute mark, the bleached-out color tone has already blanked out your desire to care about what is happening. After a while you resign yourself to only noting silly details, like when Eli visits an elderly couple and realizes while sitting on their couch that they are cannibals who wish to eat him, just before their house gets shot up by Gary Oldman and his gang, who are trying to get ahold of Eli's Bible (the last one in existence, we're told) so he can use it to control people. Why he needs the Bible is never really clear, because he already rules the town. The silliest twist comes at the end, though, and it is almost worth spoiling, but I won't do it. Despite all of this, I will say that Gary Oldman is pretty excellent at times, and Denzel Washington is Denzel Washington, but they were both upstaged in what is the most memorable part of the film: a bartender asks Eli if he wants a glass of water, and some thirsty dickhead in the audience shouts, "Yeah."