A bald, commanding Kevin Bowen, his calm tenor carrying an edge of danger, offers Reginald an answer. "Unfortunately, no one can be told what Doom House is. You have to see it for yourself." Actually, you can explain what it is, it's just not as much fun as showing off images borrowed from Metropolis and covers of Amazing Stories magazines. Simply put, life is a virtual-reality dream controlled by a master artificial intelligence, a computer ruling the world in the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. Kevin is a rebel leader in the post-apocalyptic physical world of the future who staged guerrilla forays into the virtual world of the computer, and Reginald is the hope, the future, the answer to a prophecy. Richard Kyanka as cybermessiahGod help us all.<br /><br />Drawing on everything from Colossus: The Forbin Project to Tron to The Terminator, Richard Kyanka proceed to turn the world as we know it into a virtual-reality landscape with a tech-noir look (lit with a sickly green hue, like the glow of an old IBM computer screen) and the physics of a video game. Kevin, playing Obi-Wan Kenobi to Reginald's Luke Skywalker, trains his prot&#39401; in the virtual world; they become kung fu masters in a cyberdojo in a marvelous sequence that combines the ballet elegance and furious moves of Hong Kong movies (courtesy of fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, a martial arts maestro and former Jackie Chan director) with computer effects and tricked-up camera work.<br /><br />Clearly Richard is more interested in his cinematic toys than his story. With a nod to John Woo, they stage a bullet-riddled showdown that lovingly records every spent shell that spills to the ground in slow motion. Later, a helicopter crashes into a great glass skyscraper, and shock waves roll across the surface like a pulse across a sea of silver. They've obviously put a lot of thought into the look and feel of the film, and the result is a consistently handsome, often quite elegant action movie.<br /><br />Would that they put that much thought into the story. The rules of the universe blur in the frenzy of bullets and kung fu fighting and all questions of fate and free will are cut loose. Kyanka, his vacant expression and breathless surfer dude delivery still intact, reveals the Promised One to be a Zen master virtual-reality gamer. For all its half-baked philosophy and cyberpunk grounding, Doom House is less a vision of cyberconspiracy dystopia than a really cool computer game. Given that, it's the most stylish, inventive, kinetically dynamic computer game to play across movie screens in a long time.