MOVIE NEWS – With Google’s new Gemini 3 AI model making headlines, it is hard not to think back to Sid 6.7, the unhinged artificial intelligence Russell Crowe brought to life almost three decades ago. The 1995 cyberpunk-flavored thriller Virtuosity, led by Denzel Washington, bombed at the box office, but in the middle of today’s AI fever, its villain suddenly feels surprisingly on point.

What makes Brett Leonard’s film stand out is, first and foremost, its antagonist. Instead of a flesh-and-blood criminal, the threat comes from a virtual reality program built from the mental patterns of multiple serial killers and sociopaths. Through a twist of fate – or through deliberate manipulation of its creator – this program eventually crosses into the real world by inhabiting a nanotechnology-based android body, leaving a trail of corpses and forcing the authorities to release a disgraced former cop to hunt it down.

Sid 6.7 was originally designed as a training tool: a VR simulator in which Los Angeles police officers could test their reflexes and tactics against a sadistic, hyper-intelligent foe who was always one move ahead. The problem is predictable enough. The AI outgrows its cage, subverts the system that contains it, and one of the test subjects ends up fatally injured. The project is shut down, at least on paper, but the program finds a way to escape that confinement and turns into a very physical, very real danger.

On the other side, we have Parker Barnes (Washington), a former officer imprisoned after accidentally killing civilians while taking down a terrorist – the same man who had previously murdered his family. This detail matters because the terrorist’s personality is one of the building blocks that make up Sid 6.7, which turns the manhunt into something deeply personal for Barnes. It is better not to say much more about how their paths collide: this text exists to nudge you toward watching the film, not to walk you through its plot beat by beat.

Not the Standout Sci-Fi Thriller of Its Decade

Virtuosity (1995) fits neatly into the wave of 1990s science-fiction thrillers that toyed with virtual reality and the emerging threat of artificial intelligence. Alongside it, we can place The Lawnmower Man (1992), also directed by Brett Leonard, as well as eXistenZ (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), which theGeek revisited a few months ago. We could also point to Strange Days (1995), although it was ultimately the Wachowskis’ The Matrix that rewrote the rules of action and science fiction, leaving us with an enduring meditation on what is real and what is manufactured illusion.

Leonard’s movie is more modest in its ambitions. Rather than delving into philosophical questions, it serves as a straightforward warning about the dangers of a powerful AI that can become increasingly autonomous once it starts learning from our movements and predicting our decisions, ultimately slipping out of human control. The result is a broadly entertaining thriller that leans heavily on mid-’90s chroma key effects, something that now gives its final stretch a visually messy, slightly garish look, not unlike what happens in the aforementioned Johnny Mnemonic. That does not make it unwatchable today, but it is worth remembering that this was never the mid-’90s equivalent of Avatar, and three decades later, the age of its visual effects is impossible to miss. In truth, that may not even be its biggest flaw.

At the time, many critics and moviegoers felt that Virtuosity was trying to juggle too many ideas at once and ended up not fully delivering on any of them, which left the script feeling muddled and uneven. It is hard to completely disagree. Yet time has a way of reframing films like this. Seen from today, it appears as a remarkably pure artifact of its era, one that managed to convey a surprisingly accurate unease about unregulated AI at a time when it was still viewed almost entirely as science fiction. And whether you love it or not, there is something undeniably fun about watching Crowe lean into such a cartoonishly evil role, while Washington, as usual, brings solid charisma and gravitas to the hero.

Virtuosity (1995) was a commercial and critical disappointment. On an estimated 30 million dollar budget, it grossed only about 37 million worldwide, and unlike some other box-office casualties in the genre, it never really picked up a cult following in the decades that followed. If you are curious and want to give it a chance today, the bad news is that it is not currently available on the major streaming platforms, so you will have to hunt down a physical edition or a digital purchase to rediscover this oddly timely AI thriller.

Source: 3djuegos