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Why, because this is 1995, and nobody knows that when you get shot in the face playing Call of Duty with your Oculus Rift, your head doesn’t explode in real life. I don’t even know why anybody would intentionally design it to work that way, or even how they might do it accidentally. Why is this technology even capable of killing you? I’ve seen cops train with paintball. Would anyone play paintball if there were a realistic chance of having your chest cavity exploded?

But of course, that’s the way it works in movies. And that’s the way it works when Parker’s dispensable partner gets murdered by SID 6.7, the boss fight at the end of the program. SID is what the LAPD hopes to put their recruits up against to teach them how to take down vicious killers. Unfortunately, SID’s creator programmed him with the personalities of history’s most notorious killers. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you crammed Charles Manson, Genghis Khan, Hitler and Ted Bundy into one guy?

Not surprisingly, what you get is a dangerously psychotic maniac with massive impulse control issues. You also get a guy who looks like a dashing young Russell Crowe, before he developed his own massive impulse control issues.

For some reason, LAPD chief Cochran (the great William Forsythe) is shocked to find that this is what happens when you make Hitler soup, and shuts the operation down. Meanwhile, the scientists behind SID, including beautiful psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), seem just as confused. This is a movie about computers, remember, so there’s a lot of impenetrable talk about databases, neural nets, and an obviously fictional technology called a “video cassette recorder.”

It’s all pulled from the Hollywood Technical Manual of Bullshit, of course, but you can’t make a technological thriller without someone screaming at some point about how the “fail safes were supposed to be online.”

There I go again, off on a tangent. So, Parker goes back to prison (which is filled with Nazis, for some reason). For reasons that are sexy, stupid AND irrelevant, SID manages to escape the simulation and acquire an android body. That’s right. The LAPD is making androids now, but that’s not even the best part. SID already acts like a cross between The Joker and Max Headroom. Now, he has a cool T-1000 body that can do free standing backflips and repair itself from any injury by touching glass.

Wow. Why is this film using virtual reality as the hook when it’s got Denzel Washington fighting a Terminator?

SID, naturally, goes on an immediate murder spree. Instead of calling in a SWAT team, or the Navy Seals, Cochran decides that Parker Barnes is the only man who can catch SID. Obviously Parker is released, and obviously he is paired with Dr. Carter, who has no law enforcement experience whatsoever. And... that’s pretty much it. The rest of the film is Denzel vs. The Terminator. Although as I said, Crowe’s performance as SID is intentionally over the top, to the point where he even starts dressing and cackling like a certain Crown Prince of Crime.

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