fine whine

Watching movies with lowered expectations seems to elevate mediocre ones to generally pretty decent, I've found. Forgetting the reasons I add films to my list to be watched also helps, as it gives me the added challenge of figuring out why I watch a movie. Not reading the back covers also adds to the overall mystique.

That said, having gone into it knowing nothing that I couldn't discover from the front cover of the DVD, I generally enjoyed Virtuosity. It wasn't great (or even good), but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Had I known that director Brett Leonard was also responsible for the thoroughly atrocious Lawnmower man, my judgment might have been a little more clouded. Moreover had I known that he'd done the IMAX 3-D semi-flop T-rex: back to the Cretaceous I might've skipped Virtuosity altogether. But I wasn't aware of those facts nor did Brett Leonard's name in the opening titles trigger the long-forgotten tidbits I have just mentioned, so Denzel, Russell and the rest got the benefit of a relatively clean slate.

Well, they needed it.

Now I shouldn't be so hard on the whole thing. The concept's only about half clich�d, and the overall plotting was rather well done with certain details (mechanical arms, glass-eating nanobots and whatnot) wrapped into the story quite well. Somehow, though, that alone doesn't make for a good movie.

For a film that was shot ten years ago the computer graphics are passable, noticeable only here and there to be severely dated CGI. As for computers in general, this movie generally avoided addressing them at all, and slipped up only a couple times with some technobabble about operating systems and later with an oscilloscope or some other scientific equipment rigged to a bomb using giant fiber optic cables plugged into BNC jacks. Some of their other bits of kit looked jarringly out-of-date and there's this one Pioneer video CD player that looked intriguingly like a concept that never caught on.

Enough geekery. The movie does falter here and there, particularly when Kelly Lynch is onscreen or when Russell and Denzel aren't, and there's a general sloppiness that makes the whole thing look as though the majority of the work went into the scenes that comprised the trailer at the expense of the others. The opening sequence is very well done, and a lot of the sets and props look good, but the whole thing just doesn't gel quite right. There's a scene where the vaguely evil programmer (Steve Spinella, recognizable but impossible to pin down to any single role) is talking to a giant projection of the digital Russell and Mr. Crowe's looking down at the programmer... except he's standing on the other side. Didn't anybody look at the video before final cut? I realize that the graphics were likely added in post, but why, oh why, didn't somebody try flipping it if nothing else? Lazy, lazy filmmakers.

Complaints aside, there are far worse ways to spend ninety-odd minutes. But at the risk of somebody attempting any of them, I'm not going to make a list.