Virtuosity
An orgy involving Demolition Man, Max Headroom, I, Robot, The Lawnmower Man, The Thirteenth Floor. It has all the hallmarks of the era, but Denzel thinks he is in a drama.
The plot is straight out of Demolition Man, in LA. In “the future”, VR is as lifelike as Zuckerborg’s legless metaverse, but it’s good enough for training police officers and porn.
One scientist is working on a humanoid cyborg made of silicon-based voxels or something, but they don’t have the software. By combining both (chucking a futuristic USB drive in the glitter goo), they bring SID 6.7 into the real world, after which he Frankenstein-s out of there. Being silicon-based, the humanoid evilness regenerates by absorbing glass directly.
The only guy that can stop him is an ex-cop, jailed for murder after a expy Timothy McVeigh blows up his wife and daughter in front of his eyes, as the terrorist is being interviewed by a female Geraldo Rivera. Our protagonist goes postal and murders everyone.
You see, SID stands for Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous. Not a bad band name. He is a neural net trained on evil people: Adolf Hitler, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson. There’s also other names flashing by, I noticed Pinochet (how progressive), David Koresh (from Waco), and other serial killers. One of the killers is the fake Timothy McVeigh that killed the protagonist’s family.
Our protagonist is helped by his formed police boss, but he is nearly shanked by a Nazi in prison. He takes the Escape from L.A. bargain, and chases the evil incarnate, with the “help” of the shrink writing a book about clinical psychiatry. She doesn’t do much really, just provide a kid to be kidnapped at the end.
The evil killer is even nastier, he seeks publicity and audiences. After holding up a nightclub, he escapes and watches an UFC match on TV, so that’s where he goes next. After attempting second base with a random girl dancing for the cameras, he kills some people then runs off as our protagonist arrives.
On the L train, the protagonist misses the shot, so a random woman is gunned down is broad daylight. Fake News, he didn’t kill her, the evil dude did, but our protagonist is taken back to prison. He doesn’t get there, the antagonist frees him, Yin and Yang.
The audience requires upping the ante, so he murders a pro-immigration politician during a debate, and kidnaps the kid to give some minor motivation to the protagonist.
There’s a final showdown on a roof, lifted from Die Hard, but also reused in Repo Man: the final part is repeated, since that happens in VR.
The antagonist is put back in the machine to reveal the location of the girl, he “wins” in the fake world. The corporate stooge gets punched in the face, and all ends well.
Denzel thinks he is in a drama. Russell Crowe, on the other hand, it’s so over the top, it goes through the roof.
It’s like if in Demolition Man, Wesley Snipes would remain as-is, but Stallone’s character was a proper thespian.
This could be solved with a proper sidekick, but there’s nothing here, just wet blankets as cameos. I would swap the pseudo-live interest with Kevin J. O’Connor, if he played Benny from The Mummy.
There are more cameos. William Fichtner as a corporate idiot (the role of Miguel Ferrer on RoboCop, but more suave), and Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Speaking of the cast, no fucking way the little kid is the girl from The Big Bang Theory, no freaking way! She is so young, you can’t even notice, it’s not like Suburban Commando. Traci Lords not singing is another cameo, it never ends.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.