Virtuosity
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The only reason I'm glad I saw this movie was because it helped me with one of my collections. I don't collect physical things, like coins or signatures of famous people I've had brief, meaningless encounters with. No, I collect Items in Interesting Categories, like Inventions That Their Inventors Thought Would End War Because It Would Make War Too Horrible (the Ballista, Dynamite, the Helicopter, and, of course, Atomic Bombs (and I can't help pointing out that these inventors were unanimously WRONG, because while men of science have an upper limit for the horrors of war, military men do not)). This film bolstered an existing collection: Topics that Only Produce Mediocre Movies. Current entries are Roller-blading, Virtual Reality, and Computer Hacking. (Note: I exclude "The Matrix" from Virtual Reality movies because it's different. Trust me.) I can't completely explain why roller-blading movies suck, but computer-oriented movies suffer from a basic problem: watching someone on a computer is dull. Even with completely unrealistic graphics and tense voice-overs, computer users are about as compelling as watching someone watch TV. Virtual Reality has the promise of more interesting images, but VR lacks real conflict; if something's bothering you in the virtual world, just shut it off. Problem solved. So screenwriters develop convoluted, improbable explanations why this simple resolution won't work. In "Virtuosity," the twist is that a character, without explicable motiviation, transfers a psychotic virtual character into the Real World (that's the actual real world, not the MTV show, although having a psychopathic virtual-reality character attack the people in MTV's "Real World" might make it worth watching). And naturally, as is so often the way in the Movie Universe, there is only One Man who can stop him, in this case, Denzel Washington. If you've seen more than a half dozen action movies in your lifetime, you can pretty much guess where this goes from here. And that's much of the problem. Some flashy special effects don't make up for being a mediocre Good-Guy-Hunts-Psycho movie, which is a Category that has many, many mediocre entries in it already.
If you liked the movies below, you'll probably like this one (and visa versa):
Eight-Facet Info Rating, rated on a scale of 0 (None) to 4 (Lots!)): |