Irrelevance Glorified

So, I have a Netflix account, and my queue is currently populated with over 200 items (a little bit overcounting, though, since multi-disc television shows list as one item per disc). I often put movies in the queue that probably wouldn’t be considered all that great, some that get poor reviews, just because I haven’t seen them, and I want to take a flyer on them. For instance, Demolition Man is currently in the mail, approaching my apartment. I expect this movie to be horrible, but hopefully it will be entertaining.

Virtuosity is horrible. And it is not entertaining

How bad is it, you might ask? I mean, it has Denzel Washington in it. Denzel!

Do not be fooled by Denzel’s presence. This movie is bad. It’s so bad, that well before the final credits began to roll, I was formulating this post in my mind.

Warning: there are spoilers ahead, but clearly I don’t care about spoiling this for you.

The movie takes place in (presumably) future L.A., where they are testing a virtual reality simulator, apparently for police training. They are using convicts to test out the system (Denzel, an ex-cop, is one of them), and the antagonist in the system, the thing that they are training “against”, is Sid (Russell Crowe), a virtual reality construct designed by its programmer to be an amalgam of history’s most vicious serial killers and psychopaths. Of course, one of those psychopaths just happens to be the killer that killed Denzel’s family (whom Denzel killed, and that’s why he’s in prison), but we only find that out later. Upon learning that the simulator would be shut down, for killing too many guinea pigs, the programmer — who is clearly the 2nd most psychotic person in this movie, yet was never monitored closely — figures out a way to save his precious virtual reality program by getting it implanted within an android. There’s some stupid nanotechnology technobabble, but whatever, Sid is now an android that can heal itself by absorbing glass (because he’s made of silicon, and glass is silicon dioxide). He promptly gets on the loose, surprise surprise, and Denzel is given a conditional pardon if he tracks the guy down, because Denzel is the “only guy who could catch him”. Keep in mind this is not a secretive psychopath who stalks people in the woods and kills him. This is a super-megalomaniac psychopath that lives off the thrill of being the center of attention, for better or for worse. Meaning he kills people publicly, he goes to places where there are lots of televisions and people, and starts executing people. Yeah, Denzel is the only person who can track this guy down.

I don’t mind ridiculousness. All horribleness aside, I enjoyed Armageddon even though it was absolutely terrible, since it at least it embraced it’s terribleness, and with Jerry Bruckheimer as producer, it had lots of explosions and action. When terrorists hacked into the Internets (all of the Internets!) in Live Free or Die Hard, I rolled with it. When Jeff Goldblum disabled alien ships in Independence Day by uploading a virus from his Mac, I could deal with that. I can ignore gaping technological loopholes as plot devices, if the rest of the movie can make up for it. But come on, man.

They know exactly what this guy looks like. They had him in the virtual reality simulator. They could totally broadcast his image as the suspect, and have citizens call it in. Hey, there’s Russell Crowe walking down the street in a zoot suit! Send in the cops! They don’t need Denzel for this. They just need a bunch of guys with guns who will actually shoot the guy executing people instead of running behind him and then yelling at him.

At one point in the movie, Denzel is ‘framed’ for shooting someone, and he’s put in the back of a police truck and driven away. Sid stops the truck, kills the guards, and sets Denzel free because he wants to be chased. Instead of just sitting put, of course Denzel actually leaves. And the police come to the conclusion that Denzel, who was handcuffed and disarmed in the back of a paddywagon, uncuffed himself and shot the guards and escaped. They decide to concentrate their attention on finding him rather than the serial killer who has just gleefully killed multiple people.

A little bit later, Sid hijacks a tv studio. How? Well, he walked into the glass-walled control room of the studio, kills the production crew without alerting anyone, and presses some buttons on the control panel to take over the broadcast. He then starts shooting people on air, deriving enjoyment from watching his instant ratings meter rise. Once Denzel sees this, he rushes to the scene. The police are putting up barricades all around the building. They see Denzel! They decide to just start shooting at him. Apparently, the police commissioner, who found out the truth about Denzel being framed, never sent out the memo that Denzel is still a good guy. A lot of glass was broken. But he makes it to the bullet proof elevator and takes it to the 38th floor, where the studio was. Yeah, the police were busy making sure the building was barricaded, but no one bothered to actually go up to the studio to check out the story of the psychopath in the tv studio shooting people.

Meanwhile, Denzel walks into the studio and shoots Sid. A chase ensues that leads to the top of the building. Where a police helicopter is hovering. Hmm…will the police helicopter shoot at the guy that’s been on the television murdering people….or Denzel? Yeah, Denzel. The guy can’t catch a break. Finally, the copter is called off (instead of being ordered to shoot at Sid) to allow Sid and Denzel to have a final stupid showdown fight. Where Denzel decides to punch and kick the android instead of shooting it. Where Sid jumps from platform to platform, taunts Denzel to follow him, and stomps on Denzel’s hands when he stupidly tries to follow him. When they end up falling off the building but slamming into some windows, and then Denzel tosses Sid through about 6 layers of plate glass, which cuts him up something awful.

But didn’t I say earlier that Sid regenerates by absorbing glass? Yeah, he does. So when Denzel climbs down to taunt the dying android, he obviously doesn’t think back to all the times beforehand where Sid has eaten his way through glass. Or no one at the police department thought to tell him something like “Hey, by the way, this guy is totally immortal if glass is around”. Denzel doesn’t blink an eye at the fact that throughout this movie, he keeps on shooting Sid, and hitting him, and it really doesn’t seem to do anything, despite the fact that he never once shot in him the head, which would have probably ended this stupid movie early.

But there’s one last part of the movie that I need to mention, that put me over the top. The stupid side story is that Denzel is partnered up with a female criminal psychologist, who does absolutely nothing worthwhile in this movie. But she does have a small child that is perfect for a hostage situation. So of course Sid kidnaps the kid, stuffs her in a secret location, along with a bomb. Which is exactly what that serial killer did to Denzel’s family. So the criminal psychologist couldn’t predict that Sid, who was behaving exactly like Denzel’s old nemesis, would do something similar to get to him. Anyways, they do some trickery and figure out where the kid is hiding, and race to there. By helicopter.

Smartly, Denzel doesn’t allow his partner to open the door to the hostage room. He knows its booby-trapped.
“Denzel, the bomb squad will be here in five minutes.”
“No, there’s no time, I need to go in myself.”
There’s no time? You just took an hour detour to trick Sid into telling you where the kid was? Now you’re gonna race back and say that you can’t wait five more minutes?

So then Denzel goes through the ceiling of the room to get the girl. But man…there’s a giant industrial fan spinning, blocking his way. What to do? Oh yeah, he’ll stick his bionic arm in the path of the fan and stop it. Did I forget to mention that he has a bionic arm? Yeah, well this is only the second time in the movie that it’s noted that he has a bionic left arm, and the other time is when he’s scanned at a prison and the computer cheerfully tells the audience that he has a bionic arm. So let’s be clear here : the writers gave Denzel Washington’s character a bionic arm so that he could stop a fan with it. Like, the writing team was just stuck at some point:
Writer 1 : Man, it would wrap this movie so nicely if he would just go through the ceiling and save this little girl, but there’s a big old industrial fan in the way.
Writer 2 : I know! Let’s give him a bionic metal arm!
Writer 1 : That’s ridiculous, we haven’t mentioned it at all.
Writer 2 : Don’t worry, I’ll just slide a mention of it into a scene near the beginning. It’ll make perfect sense.
Denzel does not use this arm to punch people with great force, or bust down doors, or block bullets. He only used it to stop a fan blade (which cut him open), and then used some newly exposed wiring in it to disarm a bomb by connecting two random connectors (literally, he did eeny-meeny-minie-mo over three choices).

Part of the problem is that this movie was released in 1995, and so it’s concept of the “future” is ridiculous. But I can forgive poor predictions of the future from 13 year old films. Here’s one major problem — in this film, which either takes place in the “future” or in an alternate timeline, there’s artificial intelligence, true virtual reality, and self-organizing, self-healing, nanotechnology — all of which is apparently funded by the LAPD. But the rest of the world is exactly the same as it would be in say, the late 1990′s. That’s some imagination there, Brett Leonard. You really showcased your vision.

This is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It would take some real soul-searching to decide upon the winner of that distinction. But this movie does not qualify for one category — a movie that is bad, and that made me vocally angry during it’s viewing. This movie is — Yusuke and I came up with this some time ago, I think — angry-bad. A movie that keeps me up until 1 am, writing a supremely long post that no one on the Internets will read in its entirety.

A new category is born.

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