Actor Denzel Washington has plenty of exciting projects coming down the pipeline. His most recent projects, including The Equalizer 3 and The Tragedy of Macbeth, rank among the best he’s ever done. Seriously, The Tragedy of Macbeth is fantastic (and streaming on Apple TV). Gladiator 2 is coming up, and Washington is also attached to Spike Lee’s crime thriller High and Low, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Tengoku to jigoku. So, while there’s plenty more Denzel Washington to come, why not fill in some blind spots among his back catalog? Virtuosity is one of the strangest, and it’s now streaming on Prime Video. Check out a trailer and synopsis below:
Per Prime Video: A former policeman must stop a computer-generated killer.
In Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity— and try to keep up, okay—Denzel Washington stars as Parker Barnes, a former police officer incarcerated for killing the man who murdered his family. While there, Barnes is testing out SID, a virtual reality system, with another officer. The program, short for Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous, is the virtual manifestation of history’s most violent serial killers. The program is set to be shut down after an officer’s death. Unsuccessfully, of course, after the program convinces a scientist to instead supplant its virtual consciousness into a synthetic body. SID then embarks on a real-world killing spree, and Barnes is promised a pardon if he can successfully track the killer down and return him to his virtual world.
It’s… a lot. Very 1995. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the horror and thriller space were abounding with tales of technology running amok, and a virtual reality serial killer is probably the most credible of them all. Remember Rachel Talalay’s Ghost in the Machine about a serial killer possessing appliances? Or maybe you remember my personal favorite, George Huang’s How to Make a Monster about a video game character come to life. They’re all great, though Denzel Washington’s Virtuosity, for the most part, plays it seriously.
Co-stars Russell Crowe and Kelly Lynch are great, though Virtuosity is principally a showcase for Denzel Washington. While it might appear to be more of the procedural work Washington did so often in the nineties, his Parker Barnes has enough quirks to stand out amongst his other performances.
It’s a hoot, really, and if you haven’t caught it yet, I’d absolutely recommend seeking it out on Prime Video. What do you think? Where does Virtuosity rank among Denzel Washington’s performances for you? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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