Denzel Washington’s Completely Insane Sci-Fi Movie Is Currently Streaming
Denzel Washington's Virtuosity is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
When someone mentions science fiction, you will most likely think of major franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars. However, the craziest sci-fi movie is one you may have never heard of before: Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe back before they were such household names. The movie is now streaming on Amazon Prime, and it’s worth a watch if only because of how eerily prescient the movie was when it came to predicting the future.
Four years before Keanu Reeves dazzled us in the mind-meltingly weird film The Matrix, Denzel Washington played a former cop in Virtuosity who was responsible for tracking down criminals in the confusing world of virtual reality. Meanwhile, Russell Crowe plays SID 6.7, the homicidal AI combination of history’s worst killers that Washington must square off against. When this evil AI is placed into an android body, only Washington’s grizzled and tenacious former cop (one who himself was recently released after 17 years in prison) can end his not-so-virtual reign of terror.
Part of what makes this film so fun is the fact that you get to see so many big Hollywood names before they were quite so big. These days, Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe headline major blockbuster films, but back in the mid-90s, they could still get cast in projects as wonderfully strange as Virtuosity. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll see unexpected actors in this film ranging from infamous porn star Traci Lords to an impossibly-young Kaley Cuoco, many years before she appeared as sexpot Penny in The Big Bang Theory.
Even though this particular Denzel Washington film came out nearly 30 years ago, it’s amazing to see how many things it anticipated about the future of Hollywood entertainment and future technology in general. Four years before The Matrix blew our minds with the idea of characters navigating their consciousness from physical bodies to virtual reality and back again, this movie was examining the dangers of dealing with rogue programs much scarier than Agent Smith. Decades before AI was an emergent technology that scared Hollywood writers into going on strike, this movie was exploring the deadly consequences of artificial intelligence run amok.
One of the more interesting things about the making of Virtuosity is that Denzel Washington was not content to simply serve as the star of the movie, and he ended up making major changes to the story and dialogue. Originally, his character was supposed to have a burgeoning romantic relationship with a character played by Kelly Lynch. While we’re not entirely sure why Washington nixed this particular plot point, we can’t deny that the more streamlined movie makes it easier to just sit back and enjoy the violent confrontation between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
For as much as we have praised this film for being ahead of its time, it may have been so far ahead that it ended up putting the noses of critics and audiences out of joint when it first premiered. The Denzel Washington movie currently has a 32 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the exact same audience rating, making this the rare occasion in which film buffs and casual audiences were in perfect agreement. But now that this movie is rising up through the streaming charts on Amazon Prime, more and more people are discovering the quirky appeal that can only come from a mid-90s sci-fi film that heavily features technology.
And without overselling it, one of the big draws for watching Virtuosity’s cinematic showdown between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe is that it is ironically less rooted in CGI than a modern Marvel movie. If you have grown tired of the MCU’s brownish-gray CGI slop as we have, it’s downright fun to return to a movie where most of the cool effects are completely practical. And even when the CGI parts we do get end up looking silly, there is an undeniable charm to revisiting this ‘90s idea of what the future of technology would look like.
If you end up streaming Virtuosity on Amazon Prime and digging it, you won’t have to wait long for more content featuring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Washington, for his part, is getting ready to star in Equalizer 3, a franchise so badass that Keanu Reeves wants it to cross over with John Wick. As for Crowe, he recently starred in The Pope’s Exorcist, and if you didn’t enjoy that cheesy horror movie, you may just need a priest to exorcise all the fun-hating demons out of your body.
