A Lorenzo Lamas film with a title like Cybertech P.D. does not exactly give much inspiration up front – it seems to promise to be nothing more than a tedious futuristic copy of RoboCop (1987). The surprise is that Cybertech P.D. actually goes from zero expectation to being a quite decent Cyberpunk film. The script manages a more than competent airing of the Cyberpunk milieu – commuter beltways, houses with AI personalities that give reports and temperature readings when the owner comes in, the hero’s infrared adaptable lenses which get taken over and used as live-feed monitors by the geek tech support, VR crime scene simulations, the Neal Stephenson-esque image of a former container facility turned into a hotel. There’s a really quite captivating story, which builds an intriguing thriller plot up out of the initial oddity of two identical murdered girls and then segues into the trail of a missing cloning specialist. The themes of cloning, VR, virtual sex and the Cyberpunk future are all wielded with a confident assurance. The VR scenes even obey the rules of VR illusion that many of these films flagrantly abuse. There are all sorts of amusing side touches – especially the scenes where Lamas recruits geek technician Tod Thawley into meeting a hooker and sends him into the fray only to realize he hasn’t had any actual sexual experience outside of VR. The ending makes a particularly sardonic twist on the legal definition of a clone.

On the minus side director Rick King is not much an action director – although there is one good scene where Lamas and Kari Wuhrer are attacked in a restaurant by a lethally-armed remote-controlled model helicopter. The upside is that this is a film that has a script good enough to carry it and doesn’t need action scenes. If nothing else this deserves some attention as a Lorenzo Lamas action film that can also manage wind in a discussion on the works of Claude Monet.