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Summer Movie Preview - August

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Virtuosity
Starring Denzel Washington, Kelly Lynch, Russell Crowe, Stephen Spinella.
Directed By Brett Leonard.

Apparently operating on the belief that one psychotic maniac per summer action movie isn't enough, the makers of this futuristic thriller created Sid 6.7 (Crowe), a perfectly coiffed, devastatingly handsome, computer-generated amalgam of 183 serial killers who acquires free will and escapes from cyberspace. ''He looks like the Hanes underwear model from hell,'' says Lynch, who plays a criminal psychologist helping a homicide detective (Washington) track Sid down. Lynch, who took the role ''because I always wanted to be Steve McQueen,'' says that her on-screen relationship with Washington is a working partnership only. ''You hear about how interracial characters aren't supposed to kiss, but that's not true,'' she says. ''There was no romance in the script, and we decided to keep it that way.''

What's at stake Washington could consolidate his standing as an action hero if he can overcome that silly blue vinyl costume, but Crowe could steal the show (think John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire).

The Net
Starring Sandra Bullock, Dennis Miller, Jeremy Northam.
Directed By Irwin Winkler.

The star of While You Were Sleeping switches gears from a chick flick to a chip flick in the season's umpteenth cyberpunk thriller. Bullock plays a lonely techno-geek who whiles away the hours at her terminal until she accidentally discovers a top secret program that can hack into virtually any computer network. Northam is the supergenius who wants the program back. ''It's kind of like cyber-Hitchcock,'' offers director-producer Winkler, a man clearly fluent in high-concept-speak. ''Like a high-tech The Man Who Knew Too Much, with a little Three Days of the Condor thrown in.'' Bullock describes it in more Kafkaesque terms: ''My character has had to live through a lot of dark situations,'' she says. ''She's slightly agoraphobic, but she's a computer wizard. Her mother has Alzheimer's and doesn't recognize her. Her life is taken away from her and she has to get another one. It's a really dark film. I couldn't get out a funny line. I don't know, I probably messed it up.''

What's at stake Only the future of the cyberpunk genre. If Hollywood can't make it work with Bullock manning the mouse, then compu-movies clearly aren't going to hack it.

Empire
Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Liv Tyler, Debi Mazar, Robin Tunney, Rory Cochrane, Ethan Randall, Brendan Sexton.
Directed By Allan Moyle.

As Breakfast Club director John Hughes aims younger and younger (what's next, John — Zygote's Day Out?), teen angst movies have become scarce in recent years. Trying to fill that vacuum is Empire, a tale about the gum-snapping, tattooed teenagers at a hip small-town record store. Among the characters: Lucas (Cochrane), who cleans out the register and flees to Atlantic City, and a pubescent robber (Sexton) who calls himself Warren Beatty. But the troublemakers weren't all fictional at the North Carolina shoot. Director Moyle (Pump Up the Volume) says trying to rein in his young stars made him feel like a Mother Superior. ''The layers of the story kept overlapping with our tribe,'' he jokes. ''They were actual teenagers getting in trouble with the law.'' (He wouldn't say what, if any, crimes they committed.)

What's at stake Revenue from a hot soundtrack album that includes the Gin Blossoms, Cracker, Evan Dando, Michael Stipe, and Tori Amos could outpace the movie itself.

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