Russell Crowe in Virtuosity.Image via Paramount Pictures
By
Sam Barsanti
Published 44 minutes ago
Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news.
He'll happily talk to anyone about comic book movies (he thinks the MCU peaked with Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and giant robots (he thinks some of the Transformers movies are good), and he canonically exists in The CW's "Arrowverse" series of superhero shows.
Sam is also a published poet and horror writer, and his fiction work has appeared on The No Sleep Podcast.
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The Lawnmower Man is a cult classic these days, but it didn’t take long after its release in 1992 for its vision of the future to already become dated or unrealistic — or maybe its take on virtual reality and digitized consciousness was just ahead of its time? That argument might actually be more appropriate for one of Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard’s other films: the sci-fi drama Virtuosity from 1995. If nothing else, the film did accurately predict that it’s exciting to see Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington face off against each other, 12 years before they did it again (to significantly greater critical acclaim) in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster.
Of course, it’s not too hard to get greater critical acclaim than Virtuosity, which has a 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and was a genuine bomb at the box office, but that seems harsh (especially in a world where everyone seems to have fun with The Lawnmower Man now). Really, how bad could a movie be if it has young Denzel Washington playing a renegade cop and young Russell Crowe playing an AI trained on all the worst serial killers in history? If we all take off our Serious Cineaste hats for a second, surely we can agree that something that wild must be at least a little fun.
Movies Like ‘Virtuosity’ Tried To Warn Us About AI
Russell Crowe in glasses and a suit in VirtuosityImage via Paramount Pictures
Loading your brain into a computer and becoming a cybergod like in Lawnmower Man still seems unlikely, even with modern tech advances. However, there is a 100% guarantee that someone out there is developing a large language model or AI chatbot that is trained on evil like Crowe’s SID 6.7 in Virtuosity (and there is also a 100% guarantee that someone out there intends to make money off of it while boiling the Great Lakes). A lot of sci-fi concerns about AI are unrealistic, but the basic premise of the movie might as well be how things actually work right now — or at least how tech people want it to work.
At the beginning of the movie, in the near-future year of 1999, Washington’s character (Parker Barnes) is in prison for executing a terrorist who killed his family, while the personality profile of that terrorist is one of many downloaded into the SID 6.7 AI. Researchers intend to use SID to train cops in virtual reality, but when the intensity of the experience kills a tester, the organization tries to shut SID down. Before that can happen, though, SID is downloaded into a synthetic body and he (it?) goes on a rampage. Of course, the only one who can stop him is Denzel Washington, since he has experience facing off against one of the killer personalities.
It’s weird to see a setup for a ‘90s sci-fi action movie like that and think that it’s more timely than ever, but… it kind of is. Even if everyone is right and the movie is objectively bad, it seems well-poised for a revival or reappraisal. This premise could be an HBO drama like Westworld, or a pricey/trashy Prime Video procedural. It would even be fun to see modern Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe just do a remake.
Virtuosity
Like Follow Followed R Action Crime Science Fiction Thriller Release Date August 4, 1995 Runtime 106 Minutes Director Brett Leonard Writers Eric BerntCast
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Denzel Washington
Parker Barnes
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Russell Crowe
Sid 6.7
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Kelly Lynch
Madison Carter
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Alanna Ubach
Ella
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