Denzel Washington’s Forgotten Cyberpunk Thriller Is A Wild Ride Worth Revisiting
Virtuosity was overshadowed by the release of The Matrix four years later, but its new 4K UHD release proves it’s still a propulsive pulp pleasure.
In Virtuosity, a devious criminal mind races to conquer cyberspace as a dedicated cop struggles to keep pace. That the cop in question is played by Denzel Washington, and that his adversary—played by Russell Crowe — is none other than SID 6.7, a rogue AI programmed with the personalities of the world’s most notorious serial killers, identifies the film immediately as a product of ’90s action cinema, though neither actor yet commanded the leading-man status that both would enjoy in subsequent years.
Instead, Brett Leonard’s slick and brutal follow-up to The Lawnmower Man is best remembered today (when it’s remembered, that is) for its then-innovative approach to integrating computer animation and visual effects with live-action, in service of another cautionary tale of virtual reality and its insidious allure. If you’ve never heard of Virtuosity, you’re not alone; far overshadowed by the release of The Matrix just four years later, the film languished in relative obscurity, given its high concept and even higher-wattage cast, as well as its remarkably prescient dramatization of artificial intelligence.
That the film is finally coming to 4K UHD, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, presents an opportune moment to reevaluate Virtuosity. Despite its structural shortcomings, the film feels oddly relevant in a contemporary moment where fears are mounting about the fast-evolving state of artificial intelligence and the morally desensitizing effects of virtual experience. Released in 1995 — the same year as Ghost in the Shell, Hackers, Strange Days, and Johnny Mnemonic — Virtuosity was deeply indicative of its decade’s wider influx of cyberpunk action cinema. From pre-millennium paranoia, about fast-evolving computer technology and the advent of the internet, emerged the idea that virtual worlds might soon become indiscernible from our own.
Virtuosity took that premise and ran with it: literally, in the instance of its high-octane opening sequence, in which police officer Parker Barnes (Washington) and his partner chase a violent serial killer through the streets of Los Angeles, until it’s revealed that this setting is a simulation. Barnes, serving a prison sentence after killing the terrorist who murdered his wife and child, is in fact testing a virtual-reality system designed to train law-enforcement officers at the behest of the Law Enforcement Technology Advancement Centre (LETAC).
In its infinite wisdom, LETAC has developed SID version 6.7 — a Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous virtual-reality entity that amalgamates the worst of the worst (shown in SID’s personality profile: Ted Bundy, Josef Mengele, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and more), processing data from their criminal case files to guide its own diabolical design. Of course, with few guardrails in place to monitor its development, SID 6.7 soon escapes from cyberspace and assumes physical form as a rampaging android. Given that one of the sociopaths driving SID 6.7’s programming is the same political terrorist who ended Barnes’ career, what’s the government to do but release the dedicated cop to bring this machine-gone-mad to heel?
Denzel Washington in Virtuosity.
As Barnes and SID 6.7 (realized as a Machiavellian android that can regenerate severed limbs by eating glass) careen destructively through the streets of Los Angeles, their virtual face-off escalates into a grudge match between man and machine. SID 6.7’s reign of terror is punctuated by archly villainous showboating (such as a scene where SID 6.7 coordinates its hostages’ screams as if conducting an orchestra, then slickly remixes them on turntables in a near-future nightclub) and other indications that the system, for all the havoc it unleashes, lacks any psychological grip on reality.
This dimension of Virtuosity also makes the film a great deal of fun, with Leonard leaning into cartoonish carnage at practically every turn; Crowe, in one of his first American roles, captures an eerie disassociation behind the mad gleam in SID 6.7’s eye. Throughout the program’s haywire, increasingly high-profile murder spree, one never loses sight of its inherent artificialit — a credit to the deceptive complexity of the actor’s work here.
That existential rabbit hole known as “simulation theory,” questioning whether our reality exists inside somebody else’s computer, is really an age-old human concern, dating back to Plato’s cave and Descartes’ evil demon hypothesis, but Virtuosity exploits it most to interrogate the media’s complicit role in perpetuating bloodlust through abstracting violence into hyper-brutal gameplay. There’s even a scene where SID 6.7 massacres UFC fighters during a televised sporting event, to the roaring appreciation of an arena audience entranced by the brutality before them.
Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe face off in Virtuosity.
Now available on 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome Ultra, just in time for its 30-year anniversary, Virtuosity has finally received a definitive home-media release; part of a limited-edition deluxe magnet box and slipcover set, the release features a 40-page essay booklet, as well as a packed set of extras including interviews (with Leonard, producer Garry Lucchesi, and author Eric Bernt), featurettes (focused on assembling the cast and the creating the film’s virtual screens), and commentary tracks (one with Leonard and Cinematic Void’s Jim Branscome, the other with writer and film historian Walter Chaw — both are rich and wide-ranging supplements with plenty to say about how Virtuosity anticipated many of the better-known cyberpunk films that came after it).
Of course, the star of the show is still Virtuosity itself. Newly scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, and presented in Dolby Vision High-Dynamic-Range, the film has simply never looked better. Leonard and his collaborators — particularly cinematographer Gale Tattersall and production designer Nilo Rodis-Jamero (who also worked on Johnny Mnemonic) — succeeded with Virtuality in fashioning an impressively cohesive aesthetic that merged visual-effects textures with the gritty, noir-esque Los Angeles of the film’s setting, resulting in a distinctly sleek and cinematic feel.
That aspect of the film is particularly ripe for reappreciation with this release, given how many optical illusions and multimodal textures were involved in achieving the film’s eerily synthetic, reality-morphing visual perspective; similarly, the synth-heavy soundtrack — piled high with trip-hop and dance-house tracks — sounds immaculate on this disc’s presentation.
Ultimately, Virtuosity is chintzy and cliched enough that it can’t quite stand up to the same scrutiny that its more boundary-pushing corollaries — The Matrix, especially, but also Strange Days — can endure, but it remains one of the more adventurous ’90s programmers. Though prescient in many ways, Virtuosity is content to exist primarily, and effectively, as a propulsive pulp pleasure.
