Virtuosity

                                                               365 Films

Entry #75

    Virtuosity

Directed by Brett Leonard

I figured I’d mix things up today and spend some time contemplating a movie that is truly unworthy of any such strenuous mental gymnastics.  Virtuosity was one of those instantly forgettable, warmed over, pre-millennial, let’s all freak out about the internet thrillers that seemed to pop up like whack-a-moles in the mid to late nineties.  Actually, judging by the new releases this past weekend, they are still making that movie (it’s called Disconnect and it looks like complete and utter bullshit).  I believe the proper genre terminology for these films is “Techno-thriller.”  Virtuosity is ostensibly about a homicidal computer program that breaks free of his virtual chains and ensuing plots to wreak all kinds of havoc on 1999 Los Angeles.  The police department created this amalgamation of literally every single serial killer and mass murder in the history of the universe as a virtual reality simulation in order to adequately train their officers on how to deal with that one guy who happens to have the combined personalities of Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson.   Russell Crowe plays Sid 6.7 (in one of his earliest American film roles) and Denzel Washington for some reason plays the disgraced cop turned prison inmate tasked with tracking him down.  So as you can see, so far, so stupid, right?  The interesting thing about Virtuosity is that because the advertisements and promotional behind the scenes materials featured all kinds of explosions and violent mayhem, I was supremely psyched for this movie.  For reasons most likely beyond my control (and memory), my brother happened to see it first and without me.  I remember never really getting a straight answer out of Nate as to whether or not it was any good (that should have been a tell tale sign) and then never making any real attempt to see it after that.  Then again, I couldn’t drive nor get in by myself so I would have to assume that the decision was made for me (and rightfully so as it would turn out).  Back in those days a movie would play for three months at minimum before being relegated to the shelves of Blockbuster.  In other words, you had to wait an excruciatingly long time in order to catch something on video that you had missed in theaters.  In the time between Virtuosity’s theatrical run and its home video release, Nate decided to make things interesting for me.  His dastardly plan was to hold the ending to the movie as blackmail in order to get me to do whatever bullshit chores he didn’t feel like doing.  Back in those days, I used to be obsessed with how bad guys got their final comeuppance and it could literally make or break a movie depending on how cool or lame it was.  Therefore it stood to reason the only part of Virtuosity that mattered was the ending and Nate knew this, so any lack of fealty to him on my part would have resulted in the eventual ruin of what promised to be the cinematic event of 1995.  I complied and for months lived in terror that Nate could, at any moment, divulge this information and thus, ruin my life.  In his defense, I don’t think he had any idea how much anxiety this caused me and to be fair, I don’t really think he would have ruined the ending if I had simply said “no” to one of his demands.  The moral of this story is and the reason I’m including it in this blog is because when I finally sat down to watch Virtuosity either later that year or sometime in 1997, my immediate reaction was: “that’s what I lost my shit over?”  Not only is it piss-poor and instantly dated, there literally is no ending.  Nothing mind-blowing happens, nothing out of left field, it ends exactly how you think it’s going to end just from watching the goddamn trailer.  So on top of it sucking, it had an incredibly lame ending to boot.  It was all for naught, all of my excitement, all of Nate’s scheming (for me anyway, that part probably worked out really well for him), and all of my dreams of enjoying a half-assed Demolition Man meets Copycat meets The Net rip off, they were all gone.  Virtuosity was my first real exposure to disappointment and the dangers of hype and to this day, simply ask anybody who knows me, I have never let a movie get me that excited again.  That’s a fact.