I wouldn't say it's the best adaptation out there, but I do have a lot of fond memories attached to this movie. This, to me, exemplifies the 90's as I remember them: simpler, happier times when guys got away with excessive gore and liking gloopy, slime-filled toys. This is when I got up in the morning to watch cartoons and when said cartoons were actually worth a damn.
Intellectually, though? Yeah, sure, it's a Paul Anderson flick so we know what we're getting. It's superficial, it's borderline shitty in some aspects and the special effects have aged terribly, but there's a lot of earnestness in this package - a kind of naive conviction that's the kind of feeling that makes me precisely want to get a popcorn bag out.
Like, say, Virtuosity. It's an awful turd with Russel Crowe and Denzel Washington living in a pseudo-Gibsonian world where virtual reality is all but ubiquitous. One of them is a composite of the personality models of a solid dozen serial killers and the other is a cop who's lost it all.
It's cheesy, it's way too earnest for its own good, and I love it for it.