Weirdhouse Cinema: Virtuosity
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And today we are going to be covering the 1995 action sci-fi thriller Virtuosity, a movie that you will probably remember even if you haven't seen it, because in 1995, you could not help but be exposed to the trailer where Russell Crowe struts through a future mall in a baggy purple suit and

And the tune is the Bee Gees Stayin' Alive. It was like one of the most iconic uses of a needle drop in a trailer from the 90s. That's right. That's right. And this one, as we'll discuss, does have quite a needle drop score. It also has an original score as well, but a lot of needle drops in here. It really...

It really sets the tone for the mid-90s looking to late 90s feel. Yeah. So I want to briefly tell a story of the roundabout way we came to feature this movie today.

So next week is going to be our 200th episode of Weird House Cinema. I think we still haven't picked the movie for next week, but that makes today the 199th episode. And Rob, when you and I were batting ideas around, you mentioned the possibility of doing a movie set in the year 1999 for the 199th episode. I think that was a stroke of genius there.

And folks, there are a lot of dope movies set in 99, usually made in the 80s or 90s, imagining 1999 as a terrible dystopian turning point.

So I was looking at our options. And for a while, I thought that we were going to be talking about End of Days starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. For those of you who mainly remember Arnold's roles as a Terminator or an elite commando of some kind, this is a bit outside his normal range. It is a Y2K Antichrist movie in which Arnold has to shoot the devil with a machine gun to prevent the titular End of Days.

Yeah, a movie in which Arnold plays sort of an everyman, also, I guess, sort of a super cop. But yeah, it gets tight. I don't want to see Arnold playing every man. I want to see Arnold play like a crumb chosen champion that has been forged out of trauma and loss into a human weapon.

Uh, that's what I want out of my Arnold roles. Well, I think the even weirder thing is the context that it's like a religious supernatural thriller. It's like the omen, but with Arnold in it. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't seen end of days in a long time. I barely remember it, but Rob, didn't you say there's something about the year 1999 in it that like plays into a prophecy? Yeah. Yeah. The only things I remember, uh, are that a, there's a really cool bat creature in it, but also very like Brown and dark, uh,

very saturated looking, but still cool bat monster. And then there's this whole thing about how, well, 666 really means 999 because in dreams, numbers are inverted or upside down or something. And it's... I remember it sounding pretty cool until you thought about it for like two seconds. So anyway, end of days...

That is deliciously weird as a pitch. It does apparently have glorious delivery on the theme of 1999. But unfortunately, I started watching that one and man, I was just not feeling it for this week. The vibes were a little too serious and grim, a little too much kidnapping of babies and pouring rattlesnake blood on them. Just kind of bummed me out. So I bailed on End of Days. Maybe we'll come. I don't know. Maybe if you get past those early scenes, it gets funnier. But yeah,

Wasn't feeling it this week. And I'm glad I ended up bailing because the next movie I checked out was another one set in 1999, but in a very different direction. And that is, as I said, 1995's Virtuosity starring Denzel Washington as an ace cop with a tragic backstory, a redemption arc, and a rarely mentioned bionic arm.

And also starring Russell Crowe as a synthetic computer game villain raised in a sort of digital nursery with a great teacher to student ratio, but all the teachers are serial killers. You know, I'm just now realizing that this movie does have something in common with End of Days. Both of these films are about like a sort of every man cop type figure going up against evil incarnate.

Yes. Uh, in end of days, it's evil incarnate because it is Gabriel Byrne as the devil. Yeah. Uh, who in one scene, I believe, peas fire. Uh,

You see straight fire. And in this movie, we have pure evil in the sense that we have a super AI trained on serial killers and madmen that will... Mild spoiler here. It's in the trailer. Will take physical form in the real world thanks to 3D printing. Exactly right. And that actually brings us to one of the main things I wanted to talk about at the top here. And that is that

But virtuosity is like a core example of a 1990s subgenre that I love that I would here like to dub cyber slop movies from the 90s where somebody gets sucked into a computer where the Internet tries to kill you, where a virtual reality game becomes sentient. He's learning. He's evolving at a geometric rate.

And then at the end, you've got to hack into the mainframe to kill the monster. Now, it might take more than one episode for us to fully refine our definition of cyber-slop, but I was just, you know, when I was working on the outline here, I was trying to think of a few things these movies seem to have in common that make them interesting to me. One of the things they have in common is that they almost always have atrocious early CGI. CGI that was not ready, but here it is anyway.

And usually, at some point, either the villainous entity or the MacGuffin of the movie will be represented as a floating, spinning icosahedron. And then when it's destroyed, it shatters into a bunch of triangles. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, kind of a mind's eye Death Star sort of moment. And thinking about this made me... I went back and I watched a few scenes from the original Tron because I was curious. It's like, did they have a moment like this where...

Where the main AI, the MCP, does it explode? It doesn't explode. So maybe there's another film that really got there first with the exploding digital head. I think for me, Tron is not cyber-slop. It sort of predates it, and the cyber-slop genre is derived from movies like Tron and also kind of degrades Tron's level of imagination, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of, though, I was glancing at those scenes from Tron and I was really taken aback at how colorful and vivid everything is. This is probably because I haven't watched Tron since it was like on TV on an old school television back in the day. But I was like, wow, maybe we really need to come back and watch Tron. Oh, I'd definitely be down for doing it. I watched that one a lot when I was a kid.

OK, another thing about cyber slop movies, I feel like they tend to stylize technology like the technology of the setting in amusing and sometimes even sort of thought provoking ways. So if this makes sense.

It is not just that the characters within the Cyberslop movie have a particular style and fashion choices, but it's like the technosphere itself has chosen a style, a personal style. So you get movies where tech is goth or movies where tech is Miami Vice, you know, neon colors and shoulder pads. Sometimes tech is preppy and very often tech is punk.

Yeah, yeah. Because, of course, tech should be punk because the whole genre has its roots in cyberpunk, generally with very strong connections to the literary work of William Gibson. But we could do a deeper dive easily that gets into like, you know, what are the earliest examples of sci-fi plot lines in which someone is inside of a simulation or a virtual world? And it goes back several decades. Yeah. And a lot of these movies are essentially borrowing from William Gibson type writing, but very much dumbing it down. Yeah.

Another thing that I think is interesting about these movies is not unique to them. They share this with a lot of other nineties sub genres. Um, they feel very much like they're from the end of history. And one reason for that is that every piece of actual specific culture that we get in these movies, um,

feels meaningless and interchangeable like it could be swapped out with any other piece of culture from the same object class so you know it's just a world where it's like insert work of art here insert political issue here like.

The cultural objects do not seem to really mean anything in themselves. They don't bring their specific meanings and values from reality. They're just examples of a type of thing. It feels like, you know, they're selected from a dropdown menu. I really associate this kind of storytelling with movies from the 90s in general, but especially these cyber-slot movies have this.

I wonder if there's a case, and to be clear, a very broad case, and I'm sure there are plenty of counterexamples here, but I wonder how much of this might have to do with having a lot of up-and-coming filmmakers in the 90s

maybe more like tech first style, first directors, um, and, and, uh, and, and, and, you know, screenwriters as well, uh, tackling these films informed by the models that they grew up on from the eighties, from the seventies, especially, um, that are taking a more like direct, uh,

thoughtful approach in some cases to actual social issues and political issues. And so they're sort of maybe in some cases, at least, you know, echoing the form, but without really grasping the substance. Yeah, yeah. I think that may be on to something. I'll have to think some more about that. But then also this very last point I want to make about cyber slop is I think the most important one.

And that is that these movies are at the same time both quaint and uncanny in the way they depict technologies like virtual reality, AI, the internet, and digital media.

And what I mean by that is on, on one hand, it's genuinely so cute that somebody in the year 1993 decided to write a whole screenplay about like the internet, you know, it's some kind of internet thriller. And it obviously has such a vague understanding of what the internet is and how it works. You'll have like characters navigating cyberspace with a joystick, you know, that that's how you get through the internet. Yeah.

And so it's just adorable thinking about that kind of relationship to technology is like looking at a puppy falling asleep. On the other hand, stories like this with their very loose, technically inaccurate, overly concrete, overly personalized, almost symbolic depictions of these technologies are.

can feel weirdly prescient on the metaphorical level, usually in their ability to imagine what it feels like to be acted upon by these technologies in their maturity in the future we live in now. So, for example, if

Imagine a hypothetical cyber-slop movie from 1996 where somebody hacks the internet so that the net becomes a self-evolving malevolent entity that wants to destroy you. It's both like dumb in 1996 and it takes a kind of technological ignorance to write it.

But it also captures something very real about what it would come to feel like to be an Internet user in 2025. Yeah, yeah. Plus, I guess we have to remind ourselves that a lot of these films, they are exploitive to a certain extent. They're some sort of like exploitation film. And, you know, you're often exploiting a fear, and fears are not always completely formed and certainly not rational.

Like, I'm thinking about smart, killer smart house movies from the 90s. I remember one on the SyFy channel where there was, like, a hand that went around on a little track on the ceiling in the house and, like, all that. Like, that's completely ridiculous. But, like...

I don't doubt for a second that it comes from a legitimate fear that arises based on just what people were saying, like the houses of the future are going to be like. And that fear maybe is not completely gone. Maybe it's matured. Maybe it's changed form a bit. But I think we still have that sort of fear and it still gets poked and kindled by various news stories about, oh, your toaster is watching you and so forth. Yeah, exactly. Like that vision was overly simplified and overly concrete and

But actually reality did catch up to the feeling of that plot in a way. Mm-hmm.

So perhaps we can explore more about this as we go on. But I really think that irony is the case with virtuosity. On one hand, virtuosity is quite simple-minded and literal in its engagement with the technology themes. But there are some things in it that feel unsettlingly resonant in 2025, especially in the context of a movie that is in most ways extremely 1995's version of 1999. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We'll get into this a lot more, but certainly I think there are various world-building details and choices in Virtuosity that hit with a kind of almost idiocracy-like accuracy. You know, like there's a certain amount of maybe loose black comedy to the choice, but you're like, ooh, that's a little close. And then its main focus, of course, we have an out-of-control AI menace that gets itself 3D printed so that it can go on a viral killing spree.

And it really does sweep up various pressing anxieties about the Internet, artificial intelligence, and in a limited way, the future of 3D printing of inorganic and organic materials. I'd agree with you that the themes hit harder on like the AI and digital media front than on the robotics front. But still, I don't know. Maybe one day we'll catch up to the robotics element.

Yeah. I mean, at different times when there have been accelerations in 3D printing, there have been moments where I've like, oh, this is like the Internet in all its awfulness can now take physical form. And then maybe on some level I was remembering Virtuosity trailers and I'm like, this is like Virtuosity. It's like you thought of it.

The internet made it and now it's on your desk. And granted, we've had a little more time to sort of grow with that one, I feel like, though there are some still dangerous concerns out there in the 3D printing world. But for the most part, I feel like we've gotten a little more accustomed to what it can do for us.

Now, I also find it interesting in these various films of this subgenre, ones that often include like a digital or virtual character, and they really get to what I will refer to as Job out. Oh, yes. Referencing Lawnmower Man here, which has a very close kinship with this film, in which you have a character or an AI entity that becomes a kind of God complex black hole of negative personal attributes, and

And I think this too nicely mirrors fears then as well as fears and sometimes realities now about the virtual realm of expression and consumption that we have in the digital realm that might allow too many barriers of behavior to erode and the shape of our virtual self then becomes something grotesque, dangerous, and maybe even evil. Yeah, once again, right on. I'm not going to say I think virtuosity matters.

did this on purpose. I think it may be a kind of accidental stumbling into this theme, but you're exactly right. It's there and it hits hard now. Now, another thing I want to mention at the top, which is an interesting parallel, uh, with end of days as a, as the almost choice is the alternate reality of this week. Uh,

What's really exquisite about the pitch for End of Days is the mismatch between the premise and the star, right? Like whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger was made for, it was not to like march through cathedrals by candlelight trying to stop Satan from fathering a child on Earth. That is a weird fit. And.

With today's movie, there is something similar going on. Virtuosity, I looked it up. It did have a mid-sized budget. It wasn't huge budget, but it wasn't small budget either. It was, you know, mid-sized action sci-fi kind of, you know, in the realm of what you'd expect. Yeah, yeah. But it is in both content and execution fantastic.

Yeah.

Tom Hanks was in Lawnmower Man. It's just like, oh, it's such a strange thing to imagine. Like when Russell Crowe did this movie, his big period was still ahead of him. But when Denzel did this, he already had multiple Oscar nominations. He'd won Best Supporting Actor once. Yeah.

So it's already deeply strange and amusing that you've got the top tier of future Hollywood in this dumb killer computer movie. But what's even more odd is that neither of them are phoning it in. Both of them, I think, are fantastic in this movie. They're giving full efforts, really getting into the characters. In fact, I would say I have never seen a Russell Crowe performance in...

in which he seems to be expressing as much joy through acting as he does here. This is the pinnacle. Like, his Oscar-nominated roles are comparatively grim and subdued. In this movie, you get him as a disco-strutting, synthetic serial killer, and he comes alive. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think we've really only seen him

get back into broad performances like this maybe in the likes of 2022's Thor Love and Thunder in which he gets to play Zeus with a ridiculous Greek accent I'll come back to that one because I actually like that performance quite a bit oh I haven't seen that that makes me want to see it though

But I agree. Like, yeah, both of these guys are arguably better than this movie, but both of them really deliver. I would say in Denzel Washington's case, he is almost too good for this movie in the sense that not that he's not great in it, but a role of the sort that

sometimes hits a little better if you have a less skilled actor or an actor that makes stranger choices. Whereas like Denzel, like all his choices are solid. Like he's just a complete pro here. You need somebody maybe a little sloppy, a little greener so that they can shine in a role like this. But that being said, he's still terrific.

There are two very different kinds of performances that are beyond what is required by virtuosity. Denzel gives a much more human performance than you would expect his character to have. And Russell Crowe gives a much more just like scenery ingesting, huge improvisational energy kind of performance.

Yeah, yeah. I would say his performance is like a little bit Joker, a little bit Job from Lawnmower Man. And also, at least in the visual sense, a little bit 90s Peter Gabriel. Yeah, there you go.

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Okay, are we ready for the elevator pitch? Yeah, hit us. Sid 6.7 is a computer program. He is a sadistic virtual super criminal designed for a VR training environment that will be used to test the cops of the future. But,

But the developers are still working the kinks out, and in the meantime, they are testing Sid against players from the prison population. The only one who has ever beaten him is Parker Barnes, a former police officer who is incarcerated after his vendetta killing of a terrorist who murdered his family.

And also killing several other people in the process. But when, through a series of implausible events, Sid 6.7 gets brought into our world and turned into a kind of meatspace T-1000 with blueberry blood, there's only one man who can stop him. Yep, that's right on. I would also present the idea of, oops, we 3D printed a mass murder. Yeah, that's it. This is the one thing we didn't want to happen. And here we are.

All right, let's go ahead and listen to part of the teaser trailer, because the main trailer, the one most people have heard, prominently features the BG staying alive. And we want to stay alive here on the show, so I didn't want to feature that song. I love that song, but, you know, this is what we're playing. In this high-tech crime prevention facility, one man has been recruited to play a simulated game.

The objective, to hunt down the ultimate virtual reality killer, Sid 6.7. There's only one problem. The computer changed the program. Now, he's in the real world. He's interacting. On your knees, now! He doesn't enjoy the game unless he's playing against his favorite opponent, and that's me.

From the director of Lawnmower Man. He's recreating mass murders. That's what you're saying, Sid's a copycat. Sid 6.7 is intent on improving the original. Denzel Washington. Just because I'm carrying around the joy of killing your family inside me, doesn't mean we can't be friends. Virtuosity. Game over. Game over.

Speaking of BG staying alive, I bet the virtuosity trailer is how I first learned about that song. I may, I may not have ever heard it before that.

I mean, somebody needs to be strutting when that song is playing. And if that song is playing, you will soon find yourself strutting. That's just how it works. Oh, this may be too embarrassing to say out loud, but I bet as a kid when I saw Russell Crowe walking in the blue in the purple suit, Bee Gees are playing. I probably like strutted around my house after I saw that. No joke.

All right. You might be wondering, well, hey, I want to see Virtuosity as well before listening to the rest of the episode or I want to watch it later and so forth. Well, Virtuosity was a major release, so you can find it pretty much wherever you choose to get your movies. For physical media, however, there's no beating the recently released Vinegar Syndrome Ultra.

which gives us the film newly scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, along with tons of extras, like new extras, interviews with the director and other folks. It's without a doubt the finest physical release this film has ever gotten. I can't believe it. A Vinegar Syndrome release of Virtuosity is as close as we're ever going to get to a Criterion Collection disc of Lawnmower Man. Yeah.

Yeah, Vinegar Syndrome does great work, and this is certainly the case here. I rented this from Videodrome here in Atlanta, and yeah, it looks great. I mean, the digital effects are only going to look so polished, as we'll discuss. But then again, that only really potentially hurts the film during the non-VR segments, as we'll discuss. Uh-huh.

And I will say the goopy android makeup and other practical effects look really great. Oh, yeah. I mean, you wouldn't want the CGI to look too good. I mean, that's part of the charm. Yeah, especially in those simulation sequences. Yeah. Well, so I streamed it, but, you know, I got a feeling this might not be the last time I watch Virtuosity, so I might have to snag this disc. All right, let's talk about the people who made this film, starting at the top with Brett Leonard.

Born 1959, American director of films and music videos, best known for his pivotal work in 1990s virtual reality-inspired media as he directed both today's film and 1992's The Lawnmower Man. That, of course, is the bonkers virtual reality film born out of an original script inspired by the work of Jaron Lanier and the production company's desire to keep adapting Stephen King stories they own the rights to, basically by...

slapping the title lawnmower man onto a pre-existing script that this has nothing to do with the king story is this one of the ones he sued over yes it's my understanding that he he successfully got his name taken off of this one uh because it yeah it has the original story is about like a crazy satanic lawnmower man who eats grass or something to that effect i think worships the god pan i believe yeah yeah there's some pan worship in there nothing to do with virtual reality

Now, Brett Leonard's first directorial credit was 1989's The Dead Pit. This is a supernatural horror film with like features the undead. I've never seen it, but I am super familiar with its VHS box art because you probably are as well if you were of a certain age.

Because this was a VHS rental store box that had light-up eyes powered by a little battery pack inside. It might have made sound, too. I don't remember if it made sound. But they definitely light up. And this one, I'm to understand, is very much a collector's item among VHS enthusiasts. Rob, we may have even mentioned this idea on the show before, but I have thought that at some point we should do...

A series of Weird House Cinema episodes just focusing on films that had gimmick packaging. Stuff that had light-up components or anything on the box that's different than normal to get people to pick it up and say, what's this? Yeah, VHS shell shaped like a coffin, something like that. I'm definitely here for it. Okay.

So Lawnmower Man was his follow-up to Dead Pit. And the thing is, we can all laugh about what did and didn't work about Lawnmower Man, but it made a lot of money, especially given its small budget. It connected with a VR-curious audience, and along with this film, paved the way for pretty much every VR film to follow up to and including The Matrix. That

That's right, folks. Without Lawnmower Man, no Matrix. Probably, probably. There is an IndieWire headline from earlier this year, an article by Jim Hemphill that covers the vinegar syndrome re-release of the picture. And its title is Virtuosity Walked So The Matrix Could Run. So this seems to be the opinion of various folks. And it's discussed a bit in some of the extras on the Virtuosity disc. I buy it.

So Leonard did not come back for the Lawnmower Man sequel, which is also pretty bonkers. But Hollywood did say, yes, more of this, please. So 1995 saw the release of the psychic serial killer film Hideaway based on the Dean Kuntz novel and starring Jeff Goldblum and then Virtuosity. So like we said earlier, Virtuosity, Paramount Pictures production, bigger budget.

Ultimately, did not have quite the cultural or commercial impact that everyone was banking on, but it received a fair amount of reevaluation in recent years, especially with that vinegar syndrome. Blu-ray release, as we'll discuss, the film's sci-fi commentary hits home in various ways given where we are now politically, socially, and above all technologically.

And yeah, I think a strong case could be made that this helped pave the road for things like the Matrix. And then once the Matrix explodes, like how many folks are running around with machine guns, sunglasses, and some sort of like black latex garb shooting in slow motion and going in and out of cyberspace. Though it's funny because the black latex look you only see from secondary characters in this film. I can't emphasize enough the weird phantasmagoria

fashion sensibility of Russell Crowe in this movie. He wears, like, brightly colored big suits, like loose, baggy, double-breasted suits of either the green satin or purple variety. Yes. Well, he likes attention. He wants an attention-grabbing outfit. In the extras, particularly the interview with Leonard,

he points out that Russell Crowe is essentially an influencer. Like he is, he's going after that influencer space. He wants eyes on what he is doing. Um, like that is his prime drive. Like not, not merely to do awful things, but to be seen doing awful things and to get, get those hits and get those subscribers up. Oh my God. I've got too many deep thoughts, comments about this later on in the outline, but yes, yes. Uh, he, yes, that's what's going on here before that thing even existed. Yeah.

All right, so Virtuosity hits. Post-Virtuosity, Leonard directed an IMAX film, T-Rex, Back to the Cretaceous. I might have seen this one. At this point, there have been so many IMAX and 3D dinosaur films, especially as a parent, that I've seen that I don't know where one ends and the other one begins. I always enjoy them. This one is apparently actually a huge hit for an IMAX film at the time.

When I was a teenager, I worked selling tickets to tourist attractions. And one of the places I worked was an IMAX theater. I don't recall if they ever had this one, but I remember a general awareness of it. All right. There's a chance it happened.

Now, later on, Leonard directed a pair of 2005 films that seemed very skippable. One is Man Thing. This was an early Marvel entertainment film that missed the mark for various reasons. I've read that it was one of those cases where the production was just too far away and Marvel wasn't able to really have

have their hands in it as much as they wanted. And then he also did a movie called Feed, which seems like one of the many bad taste horror films to spring up in the wake of 95.7. It also looks very skippable. Then he directed 2007's Highlander The Source. This was the final trickle of cinematic juice thus far squeezed from the husk of the Highlander franchise. I assume no Christoph Lambert.

No, he's in it. Oh, he is? Yeah. Are you kidding? This is the period of films where they had combined the movies and the TV show. And like they were literally just throwing everything in and just squeezing as much as they could out of it. And maybe they'll relaunch it here in the next year or two and we'll have so much more juice to squeeze. But this was like the last trickle. But hey, somebody had to direct these movies. Might as well have been Leonard.

Okay. Now, more recently, he directed the 2021 drama Triumph and seems to be returning to his roots with an upcoming project called Dark Star, not related to John Carpenter's Dark Star, in which, quote, a trio of astral warriors battle an AI threat.

It's in pre-production as of this recording, so I'm interested. It would be interesting to see what the director of Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity would have for us in like 2025 or 2026. I am mighty curious, yeah.

Now, his music video filmography includes Peter Gabriel's Kiss That Frog from 93. This was off of a terrific album that I totally wore out in the 90s. The video is notable for its use of CGI in a CGI frog. It was actually the first all CGI music video, apparently. The CGI frog has really, really red lips, like lipstick lips.

This was obviously a pioneering music video, which is to say it doesn't look that great by today's standard. Not like a lot of other Peter Gabriel videos like Sledgehammer, you know, which has all this great stop motion and, you know, totally stands the test of time. No, but Peter Gabriel has a presence on the soundtrack of this movie as well. Guess I'm Your Party Man. That's right. A track co-written by Tori Amos. Wow.

Yes, I look forward to talking about the music as we proceed. Okay, okay. Don't want to get ahead of you. But to finish with Leonard, it is notable that he's not just a 1990s popularizer of VR, sci-fi, and terror. He also co-founded two different companies involved in the use of VR, or the term he prefers is virtual experiences, for therapeutic purposes. So there's Virtual Psychedelics, Inc., and Ubiquity VX.

Okay, no offense to Brett Leonard at all about this, but it is kind of an odd choice to like...

the stories you have created and sent into the world about VR are all about murder and about like VR psychos, you know, taking control and unleashing havoc on the world, but then also like literally being involved in actually using VR for allegedly good purposes. I'm not trying to impugn what he's doing. No, no, no. I mean, based on the interview that I watched on that disc, he does seem to recognize the irony of this. And he frames it as sort of like, I'm giving back.

Having first helped to create these visions of paranoia. Yeah. So, fair enough. All right, moving on to the screenplay. It is by Eric Berndt, a screenwriter perhaps best known for his work on this film, but his first credited screenplay was 1994's Surviving the Game, directed by Ernest R. Dickerson.

Uh, this, uh, we've talked about this before because we've talked about, uh, Ernest R. Dickerson before, but this is the most dangerous game, but with Ice-T hunted by Rudger Hauer, Gary Busey, F. Murray Abraham, and John C. McGinley. Mm, yeah. Uh, was Dickerson the director of the, uh, Tales from the Crypt movie, Demon Knight? He was, yes. Okay. Which we talked about, uh, before on the show.

He also wrote the screenplay for 2000's Romeo Must Die and has a story credit on 2000's Highlander Endgame. All right. Highlander connections from different directions. Yeah, there was a lot of work in the Highlander world, you know, so you...

You got paid where you could get paid. Okay. I think it's time to talk about our implausible A-list actors here. Yes. Playing Lieutenant Parker Barnes. You know his name is Parker because it's said a bazillion times in this picture. Hey, Parker, this one's for you. Yeah.

This is, of course, Denzel Washington, born 1954. This is one of those moments where it's like, I don't have to tell anyone out there who Denzel Washington is. But I will say it's so easy to take a talent like him for granted because for people,

people around my age it feels like he's always been there you know he's always been there at the top of his game he's always been established he's stuck near the top of the hollywood pantheon for decades and just continues to bust out powerful often award-winning performances in big budget films all told he's currently a nine-time academy award nominee and two-time winner at this point in his career as we already pointed out he'd been nominated three times and won once

So, you know, dare I say he's coming in to this one hot, having been nominated for 1988's Cry Freedom and 1993's Malcolm X and having won again for 1990's Glory. Subsequent nominations would include 2000's The Hurricane, 2013's Flight,

2017's Fences, 2018's Roman J. Israel Esquire, and 2022's The Tragedy of Macbeth. His to-date only other Oscar win was Best Actor for his excellent performance as the dirty cop Alonzo Harris in 2001's Training Day.

I keep getting a wild hair to rewatch that one because that's a film that when it came out, I was really captivated by. It was just like really intense, had some excellent twists and just a phenomenal sense of danger as well as, of course, a terrific...

I'll say villain performance, but it's a little more complicated than that. You know, it's almost like a Shakespearean villain performance, which, of course, brings us to the tragedy of Macbeth. That, of course, is Joel Cohen's adaptation of the Scottish play that also co-stars Francis McDormand. And it is it is also awesome and, of course, features an amazing supporting cast that features a few Coen brothers regulars, as well as Brian Thompson.

You might remember Brian Thompson from such films as the second Moral Combat movie in which he played Shao Kahn and loads of like action B movies. You know, he was often an action star, but he shows up in this as one of the murderers and is terrific. Oh, in the tragedy of Macbeth. Not in Virtuosity. No, not in Virtuosity. I would be ashamed if I had missed him in Virtuosity somewhere. Yeah, Brian Thompson was also one of the punks that gets...

beat up and or killed by the terminator yeah that sounds right yeah well as i said earlier denzel washington is so much better than this movie calls for uh he he's giving the more subdued and humanistic performance and allowing russell crowe the space to just be wacky but it's both funny and genuinely like a pleasure to see him in this role

Yeah. Leonard, in the interview on the Blu-ray, commented that Denzel was pretty much at the top of his game here, requiring only mild suggestions here and there. And otherwise, you just let him run with it. And he nails it right out of the gate, possessing what he described as an almost superhuman ability to know exactly where his face is in a given shot and just maximize his expression.

Which is interesting because that's a very film-specific talent. And I know I've read that Denzel Washington very much thinks of himself as like a stage performer first. I mean, obviously, you know, more people know him from his movies, but he, you know, he's a very like stage and theater focused actor in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's back on the stage currently as we're recording this as well.

But as far as sci-fi movies goes, it goes. It's actually interesting. This is only one of three sci-fi movies that Denzel has ever appeared in, I believe, alongside 2006's Deja Vu and 2010's The Book of Eli.

And of course, he's still going strong today. Just came off of a key role in Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, which is fitting given who our next star is. That's right. Rachel and I were just talking about this, that it's got two different Gladiator actors at the top here. And yeah, of course, that brings us to Russell Crowe as Sid 6.7. That's right.

Do you think it would have been different actors in the role of previous Sid releases? Like, was Sid 3.9 Michael Dudikoff, and then by the time you get to 6.7, that's Russell Crowe? That would be interesting. If they do a Virtuosity TV series, you know, they could do different Sids, different actors. It could be a Sid of the Week situation.

So Russell Crowe, born 1964, New Zealand-born actor of Welsh and Maori ancestry. As with Denzel, I really don't need to tell you who Russell Crowe is. Very famous actor, but with a decidedly, I would say, wilder reputation and a filmography to fit that reputation.

Crow starred, started off in music and theater, including, I'm delighted to say, playing Eddie in a New Zealand production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Oh, that's surprising. But also kind of perfect, you know? Yeah. I think he was in a band at one point very early, you know, before he really got into acting. So I can definitely see Russell Crowe as Eddie. He has meatloaf energy. Yeah. Yeah.

Eddie was played by Meatloaf in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, for anyone who's trying to remember the casting. Now, Crowe broke into Australian cinema after this. A couple of big hits here were 1991's Proof and 1992's Romper Stomper, a rather famous role in which he plays a Melbourne skinhead. And these films helped to springboard him into American pictures. And that's really where virtuosity comes in. The same year he also appeared in the Sam Raimi Western, The Quick and the Dead.

Never seen that one. Is that one that also has Sharon Stone? Yeah, I believe she's the lead in it. Yeah.

so uh yeah leonard also talked about about working with russell crowe and said russell crowe is also a situation where you turn him loose uh and you just follow him and maybe you know give him a few um a few directions here and there uh but he described crowe as being kind of like a bundle of improvisational energy and so a lot of his lines here that we get some of the great ones are are improvisations that he brought uh to the script that he brought to the scenes i think

I think you can detect that without even knowing it. It just comes through in the movie. This might sound like a wild comparison, but there is almost a Jim Carrey quality to him in this. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, that kind of like Batman, Joker, Riddler kind of energy where it's just laughing and goofy. Our man here is doing backflips into the UFC octagon and landing on his head.

uh seemingly on purpose i mean he's he's completely unhinged yeah so uh russell crowe followed all this up with uh well-received performances in such hits as la confidential in 97 the insider in 99 he got an oscar nomination for that one before his award-winning star performance in ridley scott's gladiator in 2001.

He was nominated the following year for A Beautiful Mind. Subsequent films of note include the likes of 2003's Mastering Commander, The Far Side of the World, 2001's American Gangster with Denzel Washington, and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood in 2010. Now, around 2010, I'd say the credits start getting a little weirder, and it feels like he's getting to flex his muscles and supporting roles half the time, and even some villain work, again, appearing in the likes of 2012's The Man with the Iron Fists.

2013's Man of Steel, 2014's Noah, 2017's The Mummy, 2022's Love and Thunder, which, again, this is where he plays Zeus, and he gets to just be over-the-top and comedic, but also has at least one key scene that he's just oozing with villainous energy. So it's very fun to watch. A lot of people...

did not like love and thunder all that much. I didn't like it as much the first time I watched it, but I really came around to it the second time. If nothing else, it's a wacky film with some incredibly talented actors in it. You could see Christian Bale play a mad God killing alien. So, uh, you know, it's worth the ticket. Okay. Uh, but then he's lately, uh,

Crow's been playing a lot of Exorcist. 2023's The Pope's Exorcist and 2024's The Exorcist. These are apparently not related to each other. I haven't seen them, so I can't fully comment, but I don't know. He's just saying yes to Exorcist pictures. I haven't seen The Pope's Exorcist. In fact, I don't know what it's about other than what one might surmise from the title, but it pops up on streaming services, and so in our house we keep making The Pope's Exorcist jokes. Is he...

An exorcist working for the Pope or is he exercising the Pope? Many good questions. Is the Pope possessed by a devil and he has to exercise it? Or do people get possessed by the spirit of the Pope and he has to go exercise the Pope from people?

I don't know. We're going to have to await listeners to tell us how this all plays out. Can I read a quote from the Janet Maslin New York Times review of Virtuosity when it came out? Oh, yes, please. Don't fully agree with everything Maslin says here, but just for how it was received at the time.

She writes,

Yeah.

You know, I'm going to agree with the later part of that. One of the downsides of the film is like, it's like mostly silly, but then sometimes the violent scenes just get a little too real. It's like, oh man, that went harder than it needed to. But the other thing is I like the

characterization of Russell Crowe here is as a psychotic yuppie type because that captures something about the role that I didn't quite put together when I was just reacting to it myself. But yeah, there is a kind of urbanity to him. Do you know what I mean? Like he's kind of he's kind of suave and sophisticated at the same time that he is supposed to be a an uncontrollable manic psycho killer and

And that is clearly it's part of what the appeal of the character is. But it also feels I don't know, it's like a very unfocused characterization. This character is just a lot of things thrown at the wall. You know what I mean? Yeah. But of course, that also is exactly what he is like. Yeah. It's like a multiple personality situation going on. But yeah, then also as it's brought to life on the screen, you can you can see so many different influences there.

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All right, getting into the rest of the cast, and I should say the rest of the cast is very much the rest of the cast here. You know, they're all supporting what our two stars are doing. But we have Kelly Lynch playing the character Madison Carter, born 1959, American actress best known for her performances in 1989's Drugstore Cowboy, as well as Roadhouse from the same year. She's continued to work steadily in film and TV, appearing in such series as The L Word, Magic City, Mr. Mercedes, and Physical.

You know how whenever a cop who gets thrown off the force is brought back for one last job, he always has to get a new partner. Here's your new partner. Exactly. And so it is very much a supporting role in the most limited sense of the word. Like everything she's doing is here to support the characterization of Denzel Washington's character and to have her kid kidnapped, as we'll discuss. She does get to shoot the human bad guy at the end. That's true. That's true.

oh and speaking of human bad guy yep it is uh lyndon meyer played by stephen spinella born 1956 uh this was only his third film appearance but man this guy has tremendous weird energy yeah because he's the creator of sid 6.7 but also it's it's clear that he's now completely enraptured by his creation and is worshiping his creation

and wants to do anything he can. He has a true love for this awful thing that he's made.

He's continued Spinella has continued to milk his weird energy and some other great weird productions over the years 1999's ravenous another film that I think would be interesting to revisit in 2025 2010's rubber and that's that's one that's been recommended to us before and then also Steven Soderbergh's the Nick Which I am struggling to remember who he played there were a lot of actors coming in and out of that That shows what two season run, but I'm a big fan of the Nick. I

All right. We also have William Forsythe playing William Cochran. This is this character is the what he's the police chief, right? He's the chief. Yeah. He's like, you're the best cop I ever worked with. You're the absolute best. I'm the end in as well as he's like, I'm going to get you out of prison and get you back in the force, that sort of thing.

There's only one man who can stop this threat, and that's the protagonist of this film. That's right. So I don't know how we've avoided watching a William Forsythe movie up until now because he has tons of credits. American character actor who's made a career out of playing mostly heavies and cops, exactly like his role in this film. But he also played the escaped convict Evel in 1987's Raising Arizona. You know, he has that great line. He's like, hi, you're young and you got your health. What you want with a job?

He has the great scene where he holds up the general store to steal diapers. And, uh, I think he steals balloons and he says, these blow up into funny shapes. And the guy says, not unless round is funny. Yeah.

So he's great in that. And that role definitely stands apart from most of what he's known for. Because other films of note include, he played the mutant gangster flat top in 1990s Dick Tracy. And pops up in three different Rob Zombie projects. His two Halloween movies, The Devil's Rejects, and also the episode of CSI Miami that Rob Zombie directed.

Yeah. It's hard for me to recommend any of those Rob Zombie movies. Devil's Rejects is a little rough, but I remember William Forsyth being pretty great in it. Yeah. Yeah. Like he, he, he gets in there and he does his thing. It's very dependable.

Oh, we have another Oscar winner here. We have Louise Fletcher playing the character Elizabeth Dean. She's I guess what she's like a CEO or something of the company that I think she's the police commissioner. I think police commissioner. Okay. Yeah, I feel like Louise Fletcher is a great actress. Absolutely wasted here is like the character has nothing to do. She's just stands around being the authority figure in several scenes.

Yep, she lived 1934 through 2022. Best known for her role in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Also known for 1987's Flowers in the Attic and episodes of such TV shows as Deep Space Nine and Shameless.

All right, we also have William Fichtner playing Wallace in this, born 1956. Another William character actor. This one best known for playing kind of a mix, authority figures and also slimy suit types. His credits include 1998's Armageddon, 2004's Crash, and 2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in which he plays a version of the Shredder. That's weird casting. Yeah. Once again, nothing against William Fichtner. He...

He's doing what he can, but I don't even know why this character exists. Does this character have any distinct role to play in the story? Yeah, does this character do anything that could not have been combined into another character? Yeah, I don't think so. Oh, man. But we also have this character, Clyde Riley. You mentioned that the...

The developers of the technology, the VR technology, were working out some of the kinks. This guy was definitely working out some kinks with the technology, played by the excellent Kevin J. O'Connor, born 1963. Great creep character actor who, of course, plays a creep in this film.

I feel like he was on a roll in the nineties of playing various kinds of, of, uh, uh, squirming, pathetic dweebs. Yes. Uh, frequently cast by Stephen Summers and such films as 1998, deep rising, uh, 1999 is the mummy. And then later on 2004 is Van Helsing. Uh, but he's also worked steadily in a lot of high quality mainstream productions like the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson's. There will be blood in 2007, the master in 2012, uh,

You also might recognize him from another 1995 film, Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, in which he plays the magician Philip Swan.

What was his role in The Mummy? I haven't seen The Mummy in so long. Oh, my. He's Benny in The Mummy. He's the guy. So this is The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, also from the year 1999. But his thing in the movie is that he like he's a coward. He's like, well, everybody else is being dashing and rushing into danger. He's always running away from danger and trying to save his save his skin.

Uh, as so, uh, he, he is a, uh, a comic relief coward character. I remember thinking after I watched the mummy one time, we were joking in my house. I thought, I thought a good Photoshop job would be to do a, uh, people magazine sexiest man alive cover from like 1999, 2000, the millennial style, but it's just O'Connor in character from the mummy. And it says Benny, uh,

I mean, no offense to Kevin Conner personally. It's just like he plays these pathetic dweeb characters very well. And in The Mummy, his vice is cowardice. In Virtuosity, geez, it's lust. Yeah, yeah. We'll come back to him in a minute. All right. We have this character, John Donovan, who's not in it for very long, played by Costas Mandelaar.

Born 1965. I'm only mentioning him because apparently Mandelaar would go on to play a pivotal role in the later Saw sequels. I had asked my friend David Streepy about this because he's really up on the Saw movies. The soap operas of them, not so much the murder of them. But he says, quote, the back half of the franchise can't happen without him. So fair enough. He's a load-bearing element. Exactly.

Oh, and then we have Kaylee Cuoco playing the character Karen Carter, a little girl in this. Born 1985, this little girl would go on to become Penny on The Big Bang Theory.

I'm not a Big Bang Theory watcher, so I don't know the character. But when she shows up as the child in this movie, you just like instantly like, oh, no, the conversation with this child is going on too long. And that means definitely the child will be in peril in the third act. We're going to get into a Gene Siskel situation with this character. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Russell Crowe is going to kidnap her and tie her to a bomb like we saw in the flashback. It's very predictable. Yeah.

Yeah, Cuoco has been in a bunch of interesting projects post-Big Bang Theory, including TV's The Flight Attendant, which I did watch, and I thought she was very good in that. She also voices Harley Quinn on the current Harley Quinn animated series. Oh, cool.

Oh, Tracy Lords is back. We talked about her in Blade. She's one of the vampire henchmen in Blade. Here she plays Media Zone's singer. So I think she's sort of playing herself here. This is another film where we have some major 90s rave energy. And I think that's where she was at this point with her reinvention as a musical act. And so she kind of plays herself here performing the track Fallen Angel, which is also on the soundtrack.

I was going to talk about this later, but you kind of can't have a really complete, coherent cyber-slop movie without a techno club scene. You always have to have one. Not all the movies have one, but when you don't have one, you feel its absence. It's like the movie is impure. It is incomplete. Yeah, like people watch The Matrix and they're like, where's the club scene? And everyone was like, well, we got to do that in the sequel. And they did.

No, there is a club scene in The Matrix. Well, it's only very brief. It's at the beginning in the real world when they're like... Some friends come into Keanu Reeves' apartment and they take him out to a club and I think he meets Trinity there. It goes by in a few seconds. Oh, okay. It's been a while since I've seen it. I'm on the cusp of re-watching The Matrix and I mainly remember... There's definitely like a...

real world rave scene in the sequel or maybe the third one i can't remember one of the two sequels uh where they're like hey it's the eve of the big battle let's have a rager and they do i still haven't seen the sequels oh i i i guess i'm on the cusp of re-watching the sequels as well so i'll report back okay

Finally, the composer here is Christopher Young, born 1958. Essentially, Young built an electronic orchestral score here around the movie's needle drop score of mostly electronic dance music.

with some rock and even a Peter Gabriel track thrown in. And I would say, I think Young does a pretty seamless job here. The soundtrack features music by the likes of Live, Black Grape, Juno Reactor, Tricky, William Orbit, London Beat, Lords of Acid, Tracy Lords, Debbie Harry, The Bee Gees, and again, that Party Man track from Peter Gabriel co-written by Tori Amos.

The Party Man track is surprisingly emotionally gripping. It's like, you know, oh, you really feel the strain in his voice. It's a weird thing to hear right after you just saw them like destroy Sid 6.7's personality module by having it run over by a truck after they had to like shoot a computer programmer. Yeah.

Guess I'm your party man. Yeah, I believe it's a track that Gabriel and company did for this production. It was later collected on an album that collected different songs that he did for different film productions. And has the same title as a song from the Prince Batman soundtrack. Yes. Seems to refer to Jack Nicholson's Joker. But it's not the same song. I checked. Yeah.

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The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real, the road to innovation can be tricky. You need the right tools to push what's possible and build the future. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you build your own way.

With Azure AI Foundry streamlined tool chain, model choice, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, you can build the next big thing the way you want. But here's what's key. You can innovate confidently with responsible AI and security that's built in from the start. The future is in your hands. To learn more, go to developer.microsoft.com/ai. Microsoft, yours to build. Hey guys, it's Matt and Leah from the Grown Up Stuff podcast.

Matt, what even is this weather? I know. I think it was sunny and snowing at the same time yesterday. It's crazy. I have to keep my sunglasses and my snow boots in my car at all times. But you know how I make sure my car can handle it all? Snow boots for your car? Sort of, but no. I make sure my oil change technician goes with Pennzoil Platinum full synthetic motor oil, which maximizes engine protection. And my engine needs Pennzoil Platinum to keep the adventures going through all the seasons, even if they're happening in the same day.

Ask for Pennzoil Platinum at Firestone Complete Auto Care. Pennzoil. Long may we drive.

This episode is brought to you by Purina. This is Samantha from Stuff Mom Never Told You. May is National Pet Month. It's time to reimagine how you care for the cat you love. Petivity is powered by Purina and developed by pet experts. Petivity's Smart Litter Box Monitoring app tracks your cat's weight and litter box behavior, alerting you to changes you may not notice on your own, so you can act sooner if something is off.

Shop the Petivity Smart Letterbox Monitor to try this game-changing technology. Petivity, powered by Purina. All right, let's dive into the plot of Virtuosity.

So the opening titles are made of pixels that slither in and out of form. The opening track, by the way, is It's a Big Day in the North by the English band Black Grape, which is a powerfully nostalgic sound. Rob, I don't know if you felt the same way I did, but hearing this, it's like a 90s English, you might call this jazz pop or maybe pop funk sound.

That sort of sound. It's got something in it like electronic saxophone. I mainly encounter this type of music through movie soundtracks. So I associate it with seeing movies in the theaters in the 90s. Yep, absolutely. Sorry, we just had an extended aside off mic where we're talking about what genre of music this is. And we did not come to a conclusion. So maybe we'll revisit that in the future.

Maybe for listener mail. But anyway, so what's actually happening in the opening scene? When the credits are done, we pop up in a sleek, futuristic train station full of polished steel and sterile white lighting.

And it's filled with people dressed almost identically. Everybody is it's like men in gray suits with black ties carrying briefcases. They're walking around synchronized in pairs. And the only people who don't match are two men in blue full body leather police uniforms wearing black wearing black caps, boots and gloves.

So we watch these two policemen step cautiously off of an elevated train onto the platform. They're looking around. And one of the men is Denzel Washington. This is our hero, Parker Barnes. Now, while both men look vigilant, we we quickly realize that Barnes is the more assured of the two. He's being cautious and observant. And the other guy seems a little more afraid.

The other guy goes, man, I can't get over how different we look. And Barnes says, maybe it's the uniforms. So I,

I think this opening is supposed to be a bit of a fake out. Like you're supposed to wonder what they're talking about here, why everything looks a little odd, but this, I think really does not work because it's obvious they're in a virtual reality world. You can guess this if you've seen the trailer and it's even more obvious because you keep seeing people like glitching and turning into pixels and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So they did not have me going here.

Anyway, they start running around looking for somebody and eventually they end up in this business district plaza where there is a green floating CGI head made out of polygons giving a news report about a bunch of gruesome crimes. I'm pretty sure it's actually Russell Crowe's doing the voice of this thing, but in a kind of tight newscaster cadence. Yeah.

And he says the three adjectives which best describe this killer are sadistic, intelligent and dangerous. What does that spell? Spell said I thought we were going to say stink, stank, stunk. But that would have that would have been great, too.

This is 6.7. So Denzel eventually traces their quarry to a Japanese restaurant. He knows to look there because he looks over the restaurant entrance on the building and sees a, an emoticon smiley face, like the colon parentheses smiley face over the entrance. It's a joke. And Sid 6.7 likes jokes.

And when we first find Sid, he is repeatedly eating a piece of sushi that regenerates every time he picks it up off the plate and eats it. So I think it suggests that, you know, here in this world, no matter how much he eats, he never gets full. It's like he's unsatisfied with the intangible pleasures of the fake world. Yeah.

I like this. I also like how the NPCs are like glitching as they eat their sushi. They're just kind of like sushi floating into their mouth. So this is definitely the section of the picture, one of the sections of the picture in the digital world where...

The roughness of the digital effects is one of the charms and absolutely works. Doesn't feel dated at all because like this is exactly the look they were going for. Yeah. And so this, of course, turns into a big gunfight scene. Both the cops and Sid just start blasting everywhere with machine guns. And the NPCs eating in the restaurant mostly appear to not notice this and they just keep sitting at their tables. Yeah.

So in this world by 1999 virtual reality has nearly 100% immersion and totally realistic graphical fidelity but NPC behavior has like not quite reached the level of the mid Grand Theft Auto games where people at least like scream and run away when something explodes. Yeah.

But, you know, this is how the mid Grand Theft Auto games felt when the mid Grand Theft Auto games felt out. Like they felt like this level of immersion. Like I actually live in Miami in the 1980s. Like, you know.

yeah yeah so anyway this fight goes on uh sid and the cops keep shooting at each other um at one point it is revealed that russell crowe has like caught and electrocuted the other cop i think you see him on ice in like a sushi tray um and at one point they borrow a page from speed and barnes gets the upper hand by shooting a digital hostage

He will later explain. They later are like Barnes. Why did you shoot the hostage? That doesn't make any sense. But then he has a clever answer. He's like the hostage wasn't real.

Didn't think of that, Sid. Yeah, because what we're going to learn shortly is this is a training simulation for police officers. But I really have to add, like, clearly for cinematic police officers, there's nothing in this training that indicates any kind of, like, actual police training, any kind of procedure or anything. Yeah, it's just like, what if you had a big Hollywood action scene with a super criminal? Exactly, yeah.

So at the end of this, Sid gets the upper hand in the fight and he starts choking out Barnes until Barnes glitches out, which looks super funny. And then he sort of fades out of existence, like he's being sucked out of the VR world.

And we're treated to a shot of a CGI bullet wound on Sid's body, rapidly healing with classic electrical zap zap fully. But then our human characters come out of the VR. So we zoom out into a room in the real world, in meat space.

where we see Sid standing there in his green suit on a giant TV screen. So like in the virtual reality studio, there's a huge screen. It's like 15 feet tall where we see what's happening in the virtual world. Uh, and we immediately hear the sounds of like men groaning in agony and we see them writhing in their VR seats. And an automated voice is saying, warning subjects exceeding the maximum dose of neural information. Um,

Now, maybe we should briefly here comment on what it looks like when you see the people in the physical space in the VR rigs. I thought this was also quite funny because they're like jiggling around and miming the motions they do in the virtual world. Like there's a

part later where we see Denzel running in the rig and he's like pumping his arms and legs but not going anywhere and it's hilarious that yeah it really looks hilarious later when they're running yes here you know they're just squirming in pain so yeah but yeah it looks a bit goofy later on yeah so they're strapped into these dangling like combine dentist chairs wearing VR divisors they're not going anywhere and

And then also you see a little computer readout that shows a 3D representation of the players' heads. And there are like these red and yellow explosions inside the skulls. Fortunately, it seems Denzel gets out just in time. He's like rattled, but he's okay. But the other guy, uh-oh, the other guy is having violent seizures. He gets pulled off onto a hospital gurney and you see them like doing a defibrillator on him and you learn he dies. Yeah, they try really hard for...

darn near 10 seconds to save him but then they're like roll him out he's done for also in the scene we meet basically all of the films major characters I don't think there's anybody major we have to meet later we already talked about them earlier all of the various functionaries commissioners and company guys I'm not gonna dwell on them

Um, but, uh, they're all standing around watching. You can kind of group them as like who's good and who's bad based on their reaction. You've got the good guys like, uh, the police chief and Kelly Lynch's character, Dr. Madison Carter. They're concerned about the test subjects. They're like, Oh, get those men out of there. He's going into shock.

And then you've got the kind of middle to bad guys, like the indifferent characters. That's William Fitchner and Louise Fletcher. They're just kind of standing there watching coldly. And at some point, Dean, there's like some very klutzy exposition dialogue where Louise Fletcher's character says virtual reality was supposed to be a safe place to train my law enforcement officers. And one of the Williams is like, that's why we were using convicts to ferret out any glitches in the system.

And they have this exchange as they're driving away in a golf cart, by the way. And then finally, we meet the obvious bad guy, Daryl Lindenmeyer. Again, this is played by Steven Spinella, who looks confusingly similar to William Fitchner. Like, they look alike and dress the same. It's almost like they accidentally cast...

both actors as the same character and they're like, well, crap, we've got to pick one and just make a role for the other guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. William Fitchner also could have played this other guy. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but he's like the creator of the VR system and they're, they're sort of grilling him about the fail safes. He seems squirrely and untrustworthy. Yeah.

But we get some backstory in the scene as well. The chief tells Parker Barnes, you know, he acknowledges that they're old friends. He says it was good to see you in uniform again, even if it was only virtual reality. Meanwhile, Barnes is he's got insights. He's like Sid 6.7. He's cheating. And I know he's cheating because I hacked the mainframe before we went in and and he's not allowed to use electricity as a weapon, but he did anyway.

And he goes and he like tries to show the chief, but Lindenmeyer, whose first name is Daryl, by the way, Daryl Lindenmeyer, he's like, no, get away from there. And so obviously that's setting up a conflict.

I want to mention that at this point in the real world, Denzel Washington's character, Parker Barnes, has great hair. He has like really cool, like futuristic feeling hair. He's not going to get to keep this hair for the rest of the picture. And I was a little disappointed by that. Yeah, they give him a haircut before they send him out on a mission later. Why is his hair super cool and cultivated in prison? But then once he's free, it's cut. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

But anyway, okay, so they send him back to prison. There's one brief thing here where they show, oh, he's got a metallic limb. He goes through a scanner. It's like, remember that, folks. It just looks like a normal arm from the outside, but they show you'll scan as he's going through, and it's apparently a metal arm.

When Barnes is sent back to prison, he randomly has to fight a neo-Nazi. I did not understand why this occurred. When I first watched it, it was almost like suggesting this fight was arranged by the powers that be, like they were trying to silence him about the VR program or something. But I don't think there's any follow through to confirm that. So I don't know why this happened. It's also very stylistic. So you could almost think we're back in a simulation just because it does not look like

It's a future prison, I guess. And you don't see any of the inmates directly. They're all behind like some sort of a glass or a screen. So you just see their silhouettes. Yes, yes. So Denzel goes into this big hall. There's nobody else in it. All these silhouettes of prisoners lined up like an audience mocking and jeering at him.

you only see them behind these silk screens. And then from the opposite end of the hall, this gross guy with a white power tattoo and an improvised stabbing weapon comes out and then they fight. And then Barnes defeats him with superior training and tactics, uh, as well as at least one brutal uppercut to the groin. And then a bunch of guards rush in and beat up Barnes. And I don't understand why this happened. Yeah. It's so stylistic. It's,

that I was expecting him to beat the Nazi to death with an Apple Macintosh, but it is how it went down. Okay. Then we go on to another scene with, with our bad guys. This is the, let me tell you a secret scene, which is pretty, pretty solid. Um,

Um, so remember Daryl Lindenmeyer, the computer company creep, uh, he's in the VR space and he walks up to the SID screen where the screen is on and SID is in there playing a piano in a green satin suit in a beyond the mind's eye dune sea landscape. And Daryl tells him, you know what? Sorry, SID, I'm going to have to deactivate you. Uh, he says, I know it was you who increased the neural sensitivity calibrations. You murdered that prisoner. Uh,

And then Sid says, I can't change what I am, Daryl. I'm a 50 terabyte self-evolving neural network, double backflip off the high platform. I'm not a swan dive. And I have to tell you, killing for real, it was a real rush.

I always love these CDs. A lot of cyber slop movies have a monologue like this, like I am a masterpiece of evil. I'm pretty sure Jobin Lawnmower Man has a speech a lot like this. This one is relatively short. Also, when he lands after doing his backflips, he explodes into a bunch of bats. And you know what? Beyond the Minds Eye had a bat swarm. I think that must have been part of a standard CG package in the 90s.

Because Sid is not really associated with bats. It's not like, you know, what else does he have to do with bats? It seems out of nowhere.

But anyway, after he says, you know, I love killing for real. It was really good. Lyndon Meyer goes, oh, my God. And then the monologue continues. It's quite good. Sid says, what God would that be? The one who created you or the one who created me? You see, in your world, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But in my world, the one who gave me life doesn't have any balls. You are frightfully inadequate for a deity, Daryl, and I will not be shut down.

Okay, so that's corny, but for what it is, that slaps. Yeah, yeah. And I should add, this whole sequence is just very well shot. It's a great integration between the live-action performance and the use of the screens, which was... I'm to understand all the screens in the film were in-camera. I'm not...

I'm assuming at least some of it was not live to screen. Leonard points out that a lot of skill went into making sure all these screens were set up right and could be seen on camera in the optimal way. Yeah, I'm impressed they achieved that. But anyway, so in the scene, Daryl says, you know, Sid, you cannot exist without the approval of the authorities. You are software and you need hardware to run on. So Sid comes up with a plan. What is that plan? He says, sacrifice your queen.

Ooh, cryptic meaning. And then the camera kind of creeps in. I like this. There's this slow creep in and he says, let me tell you a secret.

Yeah, yeah. The scene lands in an excellent place here. That being said, I'm not exactly sure what the secret was. I mean, I don't need to know because the scene still connected on an emotional level and certainly established our villain and some semblance of his plot with his creator turned worshiper. But I have some guesses what the secret might be, but it's not really clear.

Maybe we can come back to that. Yeah.

All right. So we also get the scene where Barnes meets with Dr. Madison Carter, Kelly Lynch. She like comes in. They have an interview in the prison. She introduces herself. She's a criminal psychologist. And William Forsyth asked her to do a profile on Barnes that may be useful in reducing his sentence. So they talk. She asks him about the fight. He says he was defending himself. She asks him about whether he was attracted to violence as a child. He's like, yeah, three stooges. Wile E. Coyote was great.

Nice answer. And as they keep talking, it starts to seem like what she's really interested in is Russell Crowe. I mean, what's everybody interested in? I think she wants to write a book on the criminal genius of Sid 6.7. So she starts kind of quizzing Denzel about his virtual enemy. She's like, how did you know he'd be in the Japanese restaurant? And Barnes explains what an emoticon is. Yeah.

We also hear get the first hints of Barnes's tragic backstory, which gets revealed in a trickle throughout the movie. I think I'm going to cut to the chase and just summarize the whole thing here so we don't trickle it in. So the deal is Barnes was some kind of elite detective detective.

On the case of a man named Matthew Grimes, which they call they say he was a quote political terrorist. And I like how they specify a political terrorist to make it clear he's not like a culinary terrorist. But if he's a political terrorist, what were his politics? That is not really clear at one point.

We see him speaking to the media about the haves and have-nots, but mostly that... I don't know, that's... Back to the thing I said at the beginning about cultural objects just feeling like they're meaningless in themselves, like he could have inserted any kind of political rhetoric there and it would be the same thing. Yeah, this particular...

detail of his backstory, like the basic shape of it. Okay. Some, some sort of a killer took out his family. Uh, you know, obviously that's a necessary part of what they're building here, but all the details about this guy, just, I don't know, not very convincing. Like, I feel like we could have, we should have known less about it because what we do learn is not convincing or certainly doesn't have as much of an emotional impact.

It has a real anti-verisimilitude about his political terroristiness. It suggests more that he just simply loved crime and murder. And so anyway, they tell the story of how this guy kidnapped Barnes' wife and child. He put them in a booby-trapped room so that when Barnes came to rescue them, it would trigger a bomb. And the bomb killed his family. And it's also the reason Barnes now has the bionic arm.

And so Carter is like asking him questions about like his backstory in the scene. And we get to learn that we see that he is a haunted broken man. All right. Now, from here, we move on to the Sheila scene. So we're back in the Sid warehouse, you know, where the VR world is projected on the big screen. And currently the person in here is a geeky roboticist named Clyde. Here's Kevin J. O'Connor.

And he's playing, would you call this sexy chess? It's like they're playing a chess game, moving around these giant CGI pieces on a board. But he's playing against this blonde, seductress character named Sheila 3.2. And she's like stretching out on the chaise longue in her silk pajamas while the big chess pieces zoom around. And she's like, oh, Clyde, you know, I really would like you to come visit me in the VR world. There are so many games we could play.

And Clyde is basically drooling at the screen. Meanwhile, the creepy computer guy, Daryl comes up behind him and he's like, you know, Clyde, she's very interactive, uh,

Uh, here they sort of implied that the VR chairs that are being used in the police training simulator earlier that day have some kind of, uh, sexual interface. We never see specifics on what these peripherals would look like. I'm really curious how this was going to be used for training purposes. Yeah.

And by the way, once again, no offense to Kevin J. O'Connor, but I feel like they really go out of their way to make him gross. Like come off as gross. They he's filmed slightly from below while he's leering at the screen. So we're like looking a bit up his nose and seeing his wet front teeth. They're like wet with spit and shining in the light. And he's just gazing like he's in a trance at the, at the screen. And then Clyde is like, Oh yeah, Daryl, I need to use your gear. Uh,

But Daryl tells him, no, no, no, I've got a better idea. You are a nanoroboticist. And I know that you have created the technology to 3D print a nanotech android out of blue goop. So why don't you use your blue goop machine to make Sheila 3.2, the VR model, into a full 3D robot in the real world? And then I guess y'all can get married. I don't know. Yeah.

So this is so ridiculous, obviously. It's like you're storing the technology to print bodies for digital beings right next to the place where you store your digital mass murderer beings. Yes. But then also it's like he's putting this, Daryl's putting this together for Clyde. Like Clyde was like, you know,

I could send out a woman for all of my creepy lust. I'd never thought about that before. This is my life's work, but I never put this together. You're exactly right. And also this character is depicted as he has no attributes other than does nanotechnology, robots, and experiences lust. Yeah. So you might think those would connect in his mind because that is all his mind is as a character. But yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, Clyde agrees and then walks off looking kind of grimly determined in a very funny way. And so Daryl hangs back to grab Sheila's, quote, module from the computer bank. This is an important MacGuffin in the movie. Every VR character has a little like plastic polyhedron that's got their brain inside it. But, uh-oh, Daryl pulls a switcheroo. And instead of taking Sheila's module, he takes Sid 6.7.

And then he just kicked Sheila underneath, you know, some furniture, which I thought was very disappointing. Because, first of all, I kind of wanted Sheila to have a chance to be born into the real world. Yeah. But also imagine like the cringy comedy that could have resulted if we have like a stinger at the end where police are going in to train and they're going up against Sheila instead of a super criminal.

Oh, that would be funny too. I thought maybe you were going to say, like, what if Sheila was created, but instead of just becoming a sex robot, she's the one who has to hunt down Sid 6.7. Yeah, yeah. Time for a sofa upgrade? Introducing Anabay Sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices. Anabay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly. Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anabay is the only machine-washable sofa available

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Shop the Petivity Smart Letterbox Monitor to try this game-changing technology. Petivity, powered by Purina. All right, anyway, we move on to the nanorobotics lab. Clyde shows off a robot snake, which you think is a real snake at first. Like, he shoves it in Lyndon Meyer's face.

But then he cuts it in half with some shears and reveals it is made of blue goop. And then critically for the plot, we learn that if you cut part of it off, since it's made out of silicon, it can regenerate itself by absorbing glass it finds in the environment. So the snake like rebuilds its severed tail by reaching out these blue tendrils that suck up glass from a beaker.

Uh, and honestly, this premise sets up several of the best moments in the movie where Sid will get injured and then later he'll start like sucking glass out of windows while he's got like the goop arm in the window and he's making this rage face or, uh,

At one point, he's literally like eating fistfuls of glass in the middle of a car chase. Mm-hmm. In this scene, Clyde also explains, quote, if you separate the character module from the polymer matrix, you get nanodeath. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, they start growing the robot inside of a pod, which is a good set piece. Oh, yes. I love all this stuff because the practical effects, it's blue, like it's inorganic, but it has this kind of organic nature to it. It's like this weird blue

blue alien egg that this being is growing inside. And then when it finally opens, and there's like blue goo, of course, what rises up initially is just this kind of like neutral blue humanoid. It has kind of like a

Oh, I don't know. Almost like a crash test dummy kind of vibe to it. Like it's not completely finished yet to the point that our creep researcher here is like, like, oh, it's, it's you. I'm ready to party. But then it finishes its form. It like everything smooths out digitally and it becomes not Sheila, but

Sid 6.7, like naked Terminator style. Who immediately kills Clyde, like chokes him. The pod, by the way, it looks like a cross between a Venus flytrap and a pool float. And yeah, the being is the freakiest looking thing in the movie is when Sid comes out not fully finished. Yeah, that's why if you look through the credits for this film, you'll see somebody like credited with like creature effects because it is essentially like

It's somewhere blurring the line between creature and technology. And by the way, in the scene, Russell Crowe is really stretching his ham legs, just goofing it up stupendously. Clyde says, he's like, Sheila? But it's obviously Russell Crowe. And instead, Russell Crowe says, no, I'm Oedipus, and then chokes him.

And then meanwhile, the Daryl character is watching seemingly in horror and then runs away and hides. But why is he horrified? Didn't he do this on purpose? Yeah, this is exactly what you wanted to do. What did you think was going to happen here?

So we get to see naked Russell Crowe having fun feeling gravity for the first time. He like kind of shifts around. He's like, Ooh, gravity. Uh, he also picks up a random knife and starts doing naked Tai Chi with a knife in his hand. Then he recreationally cuts off his own finger and then licks the blue goop and says, huh, that was a good year. Like it's like, it's a wine. That's the joke. Um, but you know what? It's Russell Crowe kind of sells it. Even the bad jokes sort of land. Yeah.

Oh, and then also in the scene we get a line. I think it was obviously meant for the trailer. It's sort of an I got to get me one of those moments where Sid looks directly into the camera and says, I think I'm going to like it here.

And he does like it here. That's pretty much what happens for the next, like, 40 minutes or so. So I have a question about the plot. Maybe you knew something about this, Rob. Is there something... It felt like something was missing in the subplot of the villains here that would explain why the computer company guy wanted Sid 6.7 unleashed into the world. There are some scenes that kind of imply a conspiracy, like motivated by business, but...

There are other, I mean, but only very vaguely. There are other scenes that to me implied the computer guy is like a psychotic acolyte of the religion of Sid 6.7. Like, am I remembering right that one time later he's shown in a motel room decorated like a Charles Manson murder scene? Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like a crime scene. It's like his own motel room and implied just, he just decorated it that way because he likes it.

Like, just major confusion on what is the motivation of the non-virtual meet human villains? What was their goal and who's in on it? I mean, it seems like his direct creator here is...

just comes to worship his creation. But we don't really get enough details on how this comes to pass. We're just sort of left to assume that's the case. This is an example where I probably need, well, I don't need to. I would probably get some answers if I read the novelization for the movie, which was by Terry Bisson, who has come up on the show before because we've had a couple of people write in

about his work. He won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for the short story, They're Made Out of Meat. I'm assuming, as is typical with novelizations, he probably had to fill in the gaps here and create some connective tissue for these characters.

But yeah, back to your point, why is any of this happening? Yeah. Like, why really did you orchestrate the escape of this being? Why did you help it print itself in physical form so it can run on a rampage? Like, you seem to like him and you're into what he's doing, but... Also scared by him? But also scared by him, yeah. It's like...

it seems like we needed like him to be killed by the creator here as well. If he, cause it's not like he's, he, he sort of Frankenstein's here where he's like, ah, I've gone too far and runs away, but then he continues to worship his creation. So I don't know. Anyway. So at this point in the movie, uh, the premise has been delivered, you know, Sid 6.7 is unleashed in physical form upon our world, the world of 1999, uh, in the words of William Forsyth quote, somehow sick, the Sid 6.7 got himself out of the computer, uh,

And at this point, only one man can stop him because, again, Barnes is the only prisoner who ever beats Sid in the VR training. So Barnes is granted conditional early release from prison so he can find and stop Sid. Now, at this point, what is a renegade cop who gets results always need a new partner? So he's getting paired up with Madison Carter, the criminal psychologist. Yeah.

So a few scenes to talk about from the middle portion of the movie, a lot of chasing around and investigation in that there's sort of a detective portion where Barnes and Carter investigate some crime scenes where like Sid has done random murders and one of them is staged as a copycat of the Tate LaBianca murders.

Uh, but they end up at Daryl Lindenmeyer's house, the guy who programmed Sid, uh, in a scene that I found extremely funny because so they learn how Sid 6.7 was created. Uh, they go into Lindenmeyer's computer and they're like looking at the previous Sid models and these heads just start popping up on the computer screen. And the first one we see is a Hitler head. That's like a 3d sort of polygon model of it. So it's got like a little like mustache, but it's a little polygon, uh,

And then they're showing serial killers and stuff. And Carter says, quote, this is using some kind of genetic algorithms. Sid's too complex to design. Lindenmeyer had to grow him up psychologically like a real person with multiple personality disorder. The program learns like a child, but much faster. It's like he put all these killers in Sid's nursery and let him watch them cannibalize each other.

And then Barnes says, and only the strong ones survive. But what does that mean in this context? The strongest serial killers or Hitlers are

So on one level, absolutely, this is technobabble that doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny. But it also does kind of neatly forecast some of the topics we've been discussing in the past several years about AI and about training on content and how sometimes the content that these models train on are not the best models of human behavior or human expression.

And so it's silly, but it also rings a little bit true in some ways. Yeah, but this is more like, what if you limited the reinforcement training exclusively? The training data is only a pyramid of 200 CGI serial killer heads with Hitler in there, too. Yeah. Well, I mean, in retrospect, why would we do this? But now we're kind of like, well, I guess that could happen, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so also in the scene, Barnes figures out that one of the heads in there inside Sid belonged to the guy who murdered his family. There is a lot made of this, like, oh, that would be extra bad, you know, much scarier than Ted Bundy and Hitler, um,

But much is also discussed about whether this personality is dominant within Sid or not. I found that a not very fruitful subplot. Yeah, same. The decor of Lyndon Meyer's apartment I thought was really funny. It's like a cross between Patrick Bateman's apartment and the house in The Hunger. So there's a lot of soulless Wall Street furniture and computers and stuff, but also a single purple rose in a glass bell jar. Yeah.

Uh, now let's talk about the club scene, because as we said, every one of these movies has to have a techno dance club scene. Uh, what would you, it's a like Sid 6.7 goes to a club. He, he fights his way in. Uh, how would you describe this, this club, Rob? Oh, well, I mean, it's just absolute cinematic portrayal of a nineties rave, uh, situation, you know, uh, the lights, um,

the outfits, the presence of Tracy Lord, everything is in place here. And we get that great scene where he's like strong arming his way to the front of the line to get in.

It's very futuristic and hip. But I do generally like the music here. Good track. There's live music. They've got a Star Trek DJ station with these milky white orbs instead of turntables. So you can see them doing record scratches with the orbs. Yeah, we get infrared footage of everything. It's got so many screens.

Yes. Screens everywhere. There are people walking around with video cameras that are projecting a live feed with crazy color effects onto the huge screens on the walls. Just cables dangling everywhere and like running to the helmets that are being worn by the DJs. Also, you access this club through a freight elevator. So it's like a basement club you have to go down to.

through the elevator um one thing i thought is that oh you know i went to i went to a concert earlier this week and it's like this is kind of like going to a concert today because you see people holding up their devices recording the performer standing right in front of them yeah that's a good point that's a good point why do people do that um i mean it only the world only makes sense if you're viewing it experiencing it through the the digital through the technology you know

But in this case, yeah, the performer is Tracy Lourdes up there with, what, one or two DJs on hand. She's kind of singing, kind of dancing around, wearing this kind of like Matrix-y latex attire.

And then in comes Sid. And we get this one moment, cinematography at its finest, I guess, where they're like, what if we shot Sid through Tracy Lord's legs from behind, like through her thighs from behind? And that's the shot. Yeah.

So I giggled at that. I was like, okay. Yeah. A little over the top. Yeah. Also, the fashion in the scene is chaotic. Yeah. But we do get an early glimpse of a guy in a purple double-breasted suit that Sid is going to steal and wear for much of the film. Mm-hmm.

But again, coming back to the kind of themes we talked about earlier, there's something kind of interesting here where in this scene, it becomes apparent that Sid loves that people are aiming cameras at him in the club and projecting him onto the big screen. And he smiles. He's like overwhelmed with joy. I think sincere joy, like he's not making a joke. And he says, I am beautiful. And this is one of the themes of the movie that I thought was actually kind of accidentally interesting. There's,

Something about the information environment in the setting that says there's a desire. There's like a link between the desire to be famous and the center of everybody's attention and success.

sadism or psychopathy like I haven't fully fleshed out exactly what this means but it's like a latent assumption of the film that it's not just the common assumption that there's something kind of tacky or shallow or misguided about wanting to be the center of everybody's attention or especially wanting to be the center of everybody's attention as mediated through technology like video and the internet and

But it actually goes a step farther and suggests the desire for attention like this is related to a kind of dominance drive, a desire to have power over others and even inflict pain on them. And that hit home for me somehow. Again, I don't want to.

suggest, I think this was explicitly thought out in the script, but it feels like a potent theme the movie stumbles into here. There's something about this obsession with being on camera and having people far away all watching you at the same time that is like a kind of power and domination and sadism. Yeah, yeah. And they do come back to it later on as well. Anyway, in the scene, Sid gets a drink made for him by a Johnny Cab and

And Sid is like, oh, to think you constitute one of my ancestors. And then, of course, that's one of a couple of moments in here, though, with the androids where I was like, they're kind of getting into some of the territory that Ridley Scott would later get into with with David and the alien prequels, but with with less nuance.

and more just outright meanness. That's funny, yeah. He starts rampaging in the club, of course, and this will be a type of scene that recurs. He takes everybody hostage, forces the camera to film him, and then in one funny bit... Tracy Lourdes gets away, though. She does run away, yeah. The guy behind her gets shot, but she makes it.

Um, and then he starts, uh, he starts making everybody record screams that he can play back and remix at the DJ station. This scene is really something. And Russell Crowe is just like roaring with improvisational energy. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's a weird mix, though, because on one hand, like, a scene where someone terrorizes a bunch of people with a gun, it's like, I don't like it. But on the other hand, so many other aspects of this sequence are so over the top, and the performance at the center of it is so over the top, you kind of like it as well. I mentioned this earlier, that one of the ways I think this movie kind of...

really sits weird is a tonal mismatch. I think this is actually true with Barnes's backstory as well. The thing about like his family being murdered. It's a weird, it's weird because the, the Barnes backstory is on one hand, like hackneyed, obvious, overly familiar for this type of character. You know, the cop who's taken it too personal. And at the same time, it is excessively cruel and horrible for the context of this goofy movie. Yeah.

And I felt a similar way about a lot of these scenes. Like the club scene is at once like goofy, but also just a little too nasty. It's like both, it's going off in both directions. Yeah, yeah. So I think you're right there. The tone is off here.

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Of course, this all gets interrupted when Barnes shows up, and this leads to a shootout and a car chase. I'm not going to narrate all the action scenes, but a lot of the rest of the movie follows this format. Sid goes somewhere. He starts rampaging. He wants to be on camera. He's killing people, taking hostages. Barnes arrives. There is a fight and a chase, and then Sid gets away. Yeah, and then they need to go find him, and they...

realize that he is going to go where the attention is. He's going to go where the media is. Yeah. And that's how we end up following him, for instance, to the, to the octagon. Oh boy. Okay. So yeah, I think we're near the end of our plot recap here, but we do have to talk about the UFC scene. Yeah. So I, I was expecting, I had, again, I hadn't seen, uh, virtuosity in its entirety, I think. Uh,

But I was looking over the cast and I noticed, oh, well, Ken Shamrock's in this. It looks like there's going to be some UFC action. So I was prepared for some potentially hammy UFC product integration. And I would have to say I was a bit shocked by how negatively the film portrays MMA and MMA fandom. Yeah.

Yes, virtuosity depicts the UFC as like a blood cult in which the audience are fanatical acolytes that chant in unison for death, even as people are like murdered in the audience around them. Yeah, it's like they're a bunch of bloodthirsty, half-naked savages who only pause in their chanting to violently attack or grope each other. Like that's how the movie is presenting UFC. And even the action in the octagon is...

It doesn't even resemble an actual MMA match. It's like two different fights are going on. I think there's a ref in there, but it's just pure chaos. It was only their ambitious image of what the future could hold. Yeah.

And so Sid shows up, notices that a pretty lady is on the Titan Tron or whatever the heck the big screen is there. He goes up and is creepy towards her and then pulls out a gun, does a backflip into the octagon, intentionally landing on his head and back.

and then gets up and starts intimidating all the dudes in the Octagon, including Ken Shamrock. I was a little disappointed that the world's most dangerous man didn't make a move on Sid, but fair enough. I don't know about most dangerous man status. I only remember Ken Shamrock. Wasn't he in the WWF in the 90s? He was, yeah. Okay, that's all I remember. He had some matches with Vader. So it's like if he's going to stand up to Vader, you'd think he'd stand up to Sid. But he's like, I see you got blue blood coming out of you. Fair enough. I'm standing back.

That's smart move, Ken. Don't be a hero. So basically the same thing is going to happen here, right? Parker shows up, runs, shoots at him, more blue blood, more violence, and then he gets away. Yeah. And now, as I mentioned, or maybe I didn't mention this earlier, there's a whole thing I'm not going to

bother explaining in the middle of the movie Barnes gets framed for a murder so he gets rearrested and all this stuff happens Sid actually sets him free because he wants to play it's like the Joker and Batman it's like I need you you complete me

The climax of the film takes place in a skyscraper that is the home of a TV station where there is a televised debate happening. That's what draws Sid there because he's like he wants attention about a current political controversy over immigration. This part kind of came out of nowhere and hit uncomfortably hard.

But so there's like one guy on TV saying like immigration breathes life into the culture and another guy demagoguing against immigrants and saying we got to close the border. And then Sid shows up and does the same thing. He shoots people, takes hostages and takes over the live broadcast. Takes over it, redubs it. What? Murder TV? Murder TV or death TV. Death TV. Yeah. And also has his own like logo for it.

Yeah. Yeah.

More tuning in every minute. And once again, this surprisingly interesting theme linking Sid's sadism and cruelty fundamentally with his desire for attention mediated by technology.

And in fact, the good guys sort of defeat him here, or at least in part distract him by cutting the feed. They like turn off the broadcast and limit his access to his audience. And Sid hates this. And this leads to a final chase and fight in the network building between Barnes and Sid. Of course, as one could have guessed from developments earlier, Sid has taken Carter's daughter hostage.

And while they're chasing around, they're like, where's the girl? And there's a booby trap bomb and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know, Rob, are there any elements of the climax you want to hit? Yeah, I mean, they get it. Basically, Parker and Sid get a big diehard-esque battle on top of the skyscraper. And Sid plummets through a whole bunch of glass panels and is impaled on like a million pieces of glass. And then Parker goes down to like, you know,

check out see if he's dead he's not dead yet we get a nice tight scene where he's trying to pull parker into the into the sharp shards of glass he's regenerating off of the glass because remember eating glass and touching wounds to glass is how he heals but there's a lot of repair work that needs to happen here and before he can do it parker reaches into the back of his skull and rips out his little module um and seemingly defeats the villain but then they're like but we don't know where the girl is hidden and then we get it i thought this was a nice twist

They like load him back up in the virtual. They replay what just happened, but they let him get the upper hand so that he'll spill where the girl is hiding. Right. I thought this was actually a pretty clever twist. Or where she's hidden, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's right. So what they need is information from Sid. So they killed him. They defeated him too early.

So they have to go back into the virtual world, trick him into thinking he's still in the real world so that he will spill the beans, you know, really give his villain monologue where he reveals the information. Um,

which Parker and Madison, they worked together to figure that out. Yeah, so that was solid. And of course, we also get a scene where Sid realizes he's been caught, and he jokes out real hard. And we get this scene with multiple Sid faces, digital Sid faces making angry expressions. Extreme joking, yes. But then the plot requires us to...

Also disarm a bomb that the little girl's place of concealment is booby-trapped with. And this scene just feels very anticlimactic to me. It's like we just had a really awesome final fight. We had this nice little twist on top of that final fight. But now we're just doing a standard TV show bomb disarmament.

Yeah, which wire is it? And the final solution to the bomb deactivation involves Barnes using components from his bionic arm. Did you remember that he had a bionic arm at this point?

I only thought of it when he ripped the module out of the head. I was like, I guess, because it clearly, I felt like we'd sprinkled this detail enough to where it would have to come back and have meaning. And I thought, well, I guess that was it. It was because he used the prosthetic arm to rip out the module. So it kind of surprised me again. It's like, oh, okay, this is how we're actually going to make use of this detail. He like pulls fiber optics out of his forearm and then like inserts them into the bomb to defuse it. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Also, in the end, when they defeat him, Barnes destroys Sid 6.7's character module by throwing it off the top of the skyscraper. Man, I feel like I would have done something a little more certain. We do follow up and we see it get run over by a truck, so it's all good. Sid's gone. But wouldn't you want to make sure it was destroyed? You don't even know where it lands. Yeah, what if it landed in the back of a shipment of pillows or something? Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know. There are so many ways it could have been saved. Or maybe it hits somebody in the head and gets embedded in their brain. What happens then? I don't know. Guess I'm your party man. So that is virtuosity in all its glory.

I feel like we still actually didn't hit everything that's potentially interesting about it, but yes, um, I, I, I will vouch for it. The viewing experience, despite some tonal mismatch, some things that are just, just go a little bit harder than they need to, or a little bit nastier than they need to be. It is still a pretty, uh, in fact, quite funny, nostalgic and enjoyable experience.

Yeah, it is. It's a movie that will make you laugh and it will make you think there are various parts of this film that they do connect in interesting ways with where we are now, technologically, socially, politically and more.

Just want to say one last time, hats off to Russell and Denzel. I mean, I advocate this. I think like A-list actors should take the time to do weird, trashy little B movies and just go all the way. Don't hold back. Give it your best. Absolutely.

All right. We're going to go and close out this episode of Weird House Cinema, but we would love to hear from everyone out there. What do you think of Virtuosity? Did you see it back in the 90s when it came out or do you at least remember the trailers? Have you rediscovered it or watched it for the first time in recent years? We would love to hear your thoughts.

As a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing this for 199 films. And the next...

Do you know what 200 is when it's upside down and dreams?

Oh, what is it? It's 007. Is it? I don't know. I was going to say ooze. It's almost 007. Maybe it's ooze. Ooze? Okay. Anyway, huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Hey guys, it's Matt and Leah from the Grown Up Stuff podcast.

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