“It made me sad”: the movie Denzel Washington single-handedly “turned into a piece of crap”
You know an actor is good when even their worst movies are at least semi-watchable and commercially successful based on their presence alone, something Denzel Washington has turned into an art form.
Heart Condition is definitely one that’s best left forgotten, but consider the raft of action thrillers he made that wouldn’t have been anywhere near as popular as they were if anybody other than the two-time Academy Award-winning legend was playing the leading role.
Man on Fire, Fallen, 2 Guns, The Book of Eli, Out of Time, and the entire Equalizer trilogy work as well as they do not because they’re riveting examples of the genre, but because they’re Denzel Washington flicks. Elevating mediocrity is one of the hardest gigs in Hollywood, and he makes it look easy. That said, some turds can’t be polished, and 1995’s Virtuosity falls firmly into that camp.
It’s easily one of his weakest star turns, and he pretty much admitted it after hinting that his mid-1990s run was driven more by financial gain than creative rewards. The concept of an ex-cop behind bars for killing the person who murdered his family being recruited to try out a VR simulator and take down a computerised villain who escapes into the real world had potential, but Washington ruined it.
At least, that’s how his co-star, Kelly Lynch, remembers it, after revealing that he flexed his A-list muscles to make sweeping changes to the script. Her criminal psychologist, Madison Carter, was originally supposed to be a love interest, until the leading man decided that he wasn’t sold on that particular narrative development.
Speaking to The AV Club, Lynch revealed that Virtuosity had “a wonderful script” for a while, hinting that the film’s “inexperienced director,” Brett Leonard, was easily overpowered. “When actors feel like there’s not a real captain of a ship, they can feel like, ‘I have to take this project under my wing, and I have to fix it, because no one is minding the store’. That’s the kind of feeling Denzel had, I think.”
As a result, “he took the script and rewrote it” to change her character to “some sort of a hostage, child in jeopardy thing, which I absolutely hate, and there would be no romantic relationship between these people.” Lynch also accused him of stealing her dialogue for his turn as Parker Barnes, calling it “the beginning of the end” because “the whole script unravelled.”
According to Lynch, he excised their love story because he didn’t think white audiences “want to watch a Black man with their woman,” a viewpoint she disagreed with. “It made me very sad,” she added. “Not only as an actress, because it totally turned the movie into a piece of crap, but… I get that Denzel got a little bit afraid of everything, and I’m sure he believed what he was saying, although I think he’s wrong.”
Would a romantic subplot have saved Virtuosity? Maybe, maybe not, even if Lynch thinks it would have. It wasn’t a good movie either way, and she pointed the finger of blame for that almost exclusively in his direction.
