YMMV / Virtuosity

• Complete Monster: Matthew Grimes, while still alive, was an attention-seeking political terrorist, known for bombing populated areas. Developing an obsession with police officer Parker Barnes, Grimes took his wife and daughter hostage in a kidnapping that killed them both before Parker shot him dead. Uploaded as one of the psychopathic personalities in the SID 6.7 program, Grimes' influence causes SID to take a nightclub hostage, terrifying and killing patrons at his leisure, before aiming to climb higher and higher in infamy while taking every opportunity to continue tormenting Parker.
• Funny Moments:
  • SID jumps into the UFC octagon and manages to freak out Ken Shamrock out of all people by showing him his disfigured hand while laughing.
  • When SID hijacks a televised debate, he rips the nametag patch off the maintenance uniform he stole and replaces it with one with his own name, with no explanation as to how he got it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Sid standing in the middle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship ring with his arms raised above his head becomes a lot funnier when five years later Russell Crowe found himself in a similar scene in Gladiator. The only thing missing is Sid/Crowe yelling "Are You Not Entertained?!"
  • During rooftop fight Parker keeps asking SID "where is the girl?" and years later Crowe's character would do the same thing.
  • Sid also reacts to some glass that heals him as "A good year", a movie Crowe later starred in.
  • Russell Crowe and Kevin J. O'Connor both later appeared in modern remakes of The Mummy (1932). Connor, who plays Clyde, the poor bloke who gets his neck broken by Sid, would four years later after appearing in this movie play Beni Gabor in The Mummy (1999), while Crowe, who plays Sid, would later appear in The Mummy (2017) as Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde (the latter of the infamous Split Personality Mad Doctor from Robert Louis Stevenson's book would share similarities with Sid from this film).
  • Originally, Robert Downey Jr. was supposed to play Sid until Russell Crowe replaces him, thirteen years later, Downey would later helm the Academy Award-nominated role of method actor Kirk Lazarus, which is said that Crowe was one of the inspirations behind him, in Tropic Thunder.
  • Crowe and Washington would later star in American Gangster, only with Crowe as the hero and Washington playing the villain.
• Ho Yay: Lindenmayer really loves his masterpiece. Sid's able to hypnotize him easily, which makes sense considering his origins as a hippie cult leader, fascist orators, and more.
• Memetic Mutation: Sidson ^Explanation A Soyjak variant created by Vinluv Handesbukia which was based on a frame of SID 6.7 with a strange expression.
• Narm: The UFC audience is depicted as chanting "kapow!" to a beat, even after SID throws a man to his death, gets his fingers blown off by a shotgun, and later leaps into the UFC octagon with superhuman ability.
• Moral Event Horizon: Lindemeyer crosses it when he sends SID 6.7 to the real world, who then snaps Clyde's neck.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • This isn't Russell Crowe's first American movie, but it is an early one. It is also the second acting job for a very young, at most 9-year-old, Kaley Cuoco, who plays Karin Carter. Her first movie was Quicksand: No Escape, from 1992.
  • The film also has a scene take place at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight, years before the company would gain mainstream prominence.
  • Detective Mark Hoffman has a fatal run-in with Sid in the opening.
  • "Matthew Grimes" is one of those actors who's been in everything, most notably as Dean Rivers in Zoey 101 (which happens to be owned by Paramount who distributes this movie).
• Special Effect Failure: The virtual reality scenes have not aged well since its release.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • This film would be the closest thing to an Actionized Sequel to Wes Craven's Shocker, as SID shared some traits with Horace Pinker and the last time Pinker was seen, he was trapped in the TV world and SID escaping from the VR world to commit serial killings in the real world felt like a transposal of Pinker escaping from the TV world to do the same thing.
  • Due to the Dark Universe becoming a Stillborn Franchise thanks to the poor reception of The Mummy (2017), this film is retroactively the closest anyone would get to fill the void of seeing a spin-off that follows Russell Crowe's Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde whom the latter shared similarities with SID not to mention Crowe's penchant for Evil Is Hammy in those Ax-Crazy roles.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The computer graphics used to create SID are very dated.
  • SID wears a very baggy, double-breasted suit and round tea shades, all fashion trends that died in the 90s.
  • Barnes needs to explain what an emoticon is. In the film, it's because they fell out of favor by 1999, but in the real world, it's because the filmmakers didn't trust everyone in the audience to know what they are.
    • This happens with most of the internet/computer references. Clearly the filmmakers largely expected internet culture to stagnate or even die out like a fad, as was a prevalent belief in the eighties and early nineties. There's zero effort to imagine it as having flourished and become ubiquitous.
  • The film's version of the UFC is very inaccurate and sensationalized, obviously coming from the "dark age" of Mixed Martial Arts when the sport was considered an unsavory, underground spectacle and not widely understood.
  • The oddly dissonant grunge rock song^note "White Discussion" by Live that plays when Barnes escapes from the prison truck.

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