The Worst Denzel Washington Action-Thriller According To IMDb
Denzel Washington is one of the most respected actors of his generation, if not of all time. He's played Malcolm X, Macbeth, "American Gangster" Frank Lucas, and a wide assortment of other characters, all in his highly detailed and engaging style. He's also played a large number of cops and detectives matching wits with deranged criminals in action-thrillers that are automatically more memorable for his performances in them. But not all of these genre pieces are going to be classics comparable to the high quality of his more sophisticated film work, and one film, in particular, sits at the bottom of the stack, according to voters on the Internet Movie Database.
This cable staple is nearly 30 years old at the time of writing, and it stars another actor almost equal to Washington in terms of movie star caliber and awards prestige. Despite the talent of these two stars and the film's undeniably neat science-fiction hook, it was something of a box office bomb, although it certainly has its admirers today.
Virtuosity is a cop vs. serial killer thriller in the worlds of virtual reality and artificial intelligence
Set in the Not Too Distant Future, "Virtuosity" stars Denzel Washington as Parker Barnes, a cop serving out a prison sentence for killing the psychopath who killed his family. Russell Crowe plays SID 6.7, an artificially intelligent madman that was programmed with the personalities of history's most infamous villains (as well as the killer who slew Barnes' family) for use in virtual reality training exercises by the Los Angeles Police Department.
The SID in SID 6.7 stands for Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous, and as you've probably already guessed, he's able to break out of his virtual reality existence and reconstitute himself as a nearly indestructible android in the real world. If you've seen "Demolition Man," you can probably also guess that Barnes gets released from prison in order to catch SID and put him back in VR where he belongs. There's also a little "Escape from New York" in there, as Barnes is implanted with a device that will kill him if he tries to escape without completing his mission.
It's clear that "Virtuosity" has got a great and imaginative concept behind it. Whether it lives up to its premise is open for debate, but evidently, IMDb users don't think so, since its 5.5/10 rating places it at the bottom of all the action-thrillers Washington has appeared in so far.