Russell Crowe is the MVP of this film. You don't often get to see Crowe being 'fun' in films, he's sort of built a career around serious, taciturn, characters. As such it's nice to see him letting loose as essentially an ersatz Joker figure. Crowe is so much fun in this film that it kind of suffers whenever he's not onscreen, it's the kind of film which is built largely around his performance. Denzel Washington does a lot with what he has, but really his character is too thin, especially when contrasted against the gauche, hyper-insane, Crowe. Still when the film really lets loose, and really lets Crowe do his thing, it's a ton of fun.
It's also one of those peculiar films from the 1990s which can't seem to settle onto a tone. On one hand it's asking us to be horrified by the antics of Sid, the psychotic android, but on the other hand it sort of relishes in the violence he creates. Similarly Washington's character isn't just a cop on the edge, he's actually verifiably unhinged at times. As such it's kind of difficult to actually find someone to root for. The film isn't helped at all by its flabby third act. The concept of the third act has a bunch of potential, but it gets abandoned really quickly and then sort of plods along to a weak resolution. It doesn't help that the third act deals with Sid about twenty minutes before the film ends and as such the best bit of the film has nothing to do with its ending.
Still this is one of those films I used to watch on cable TV all the time when I was kid and I gotta admit I'm probably a little blinkered to its overall faults because of it.
