Born in New Zealand and bred in Australia, Russell Crowe has been makin’ movies, singin’ songs and delightin’ ’round the world for almost four decades. He’s portrayed generals and goof-offs, cops who sing and sting, demons and diviners, pastors and priests, gladiators, reporters, whistleblowers and more than his fair share of murderers (in reality and virtual reality).

In honor of Crowe’s 60th birthday this month, Midwest Film Journal is celebrating the actor. We’ll look at the lightning-rod controversy of his 1992 Australian breakout, the genre pictures with which he broke out in Hollywood circa 1995, his early-2000s ascent into a leading man with consecutive Oscar nominations, his occasional zags into unexpected genres like comedy, musicals and exploitative schlock, and many things in between. This April, MFJ truly has A Murder of Crowes.

Virtuosity opens with the ultimate ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ trojan horse before quickly devolving further into a manic mixture of needle-drops, reasonably competent action, nonsensical tech jargon and a Peter Gabriel end-credits jam that in no way fits the tone of the film.

It’s a luscious artifact of mid-90’s cyberpunk cinema, when the grungy imaginings of a drab, post-corporate concrete-laden apocalypse and nascent experiences with personal computing and early computer generation made strange aesthetic bedfellows. A story from a time that still believed a malevolent artificial intelligence would need personality and physical presence to stir up shit rather than as a cold, computationally indifferent presence living within the pockets of middle-schoolers across the world.

That doesn’t mean Virtuosity is necessarily a good film by any standard other than the fading millennial-panic nostalgia … but goddamn, Russell Crowe tries his damndest to make it great. And he’s great, the single truly commendable thing this movie has going for it.

Crowe — coming off the success of Romper Stomper and trying to segue into Hollywood — plays Sid 6.7, an artificial intelligence cultivated from the consciousnesses of the world’s worst serial killers. Sid 6.7 was developed under the ignorant eyes of the Los Angeles Police Department and trained against expendable convicts, one of whom happens to be Barnes (Denzel Washington), an ex-cop. When Sid’s creator, Lindenmeyer (Stephen Spinella), connives to release his demon into the real world with nanotechnology, it becomes Barnes’ responsibility to bring him in.

Washington reportedly rewrote the film prior to production to diminish the sexual tension between himself and the female lead, Carter (Kelly Lynch). His reasoning was simple: In the mid-1990s, general audiences didn’t want to see a Black man ending up with a white woman. Whether Washington was right doesn’t really matter because in either iteration of the film, his character was doomed from the start. Nobody playing the role could hold a candle to Crowe.

The two spar throughout, developing the traditional relationship between cop and criminal. If he can’t stop Sid, Barnes can’t get his freedom from incarceration; Barnes murdered a serial killer in cold blood and two accidental bystanders besides). Meanwhile, Sid thinks only in binary game logic and sees Barnes as his ultimate foe. Crowe carries all of this, screaming his insane philosophies with a mad cackle. Truthfully, Sid’s ultimate plans are all boilerplate big-screen serial-killer stuff about audience size and recognition, explained via exposition about his copycat nature: He’s just doing what his programming was made for, to a greater degree.

It culminates in a live broadcast he dubs Death TV, complete with an on-air graphic he somehow created in the time it took to take over a TV studio. Would regular, God-loving Americans really watch such a thing? I guess the contemporary answer to that is: Have you ever found yourself scrolling the For You tab on X?

“Magnificent” undersells the level of performance Crowe delivers as Sid 6.7, imbuing every single line with an animated artificiality that amazes while also feeling intuitively appropriate for his synthezoid nature. The longer he spends in our world, the more dangerous he becomes — evolving the most human trait of all, a fashion sense. Crowe has nothing to lose as Sid 6.7 and he just goes for broke. His later career has become a decade of pleasureful no-fucks-given roles in smaller films, bringing the energy of a confident thespian who has taken his career to the top and can now enjoy his success. Virtuosity is different, brimming with the conviction of a young actor who knows he’s the only person on set who can truly save the material. Compared to the reliably grounded Washington, Crowe is so over-the-top that he’s all the way on the other side, acting in an entirely different, much better film.