March 10, 1995 | Don’t expect any mercy from the people who made Outbreak, a smashingly first-rate thriller that will do more to rev your pulse rate than a week of aerobics classes.
Director Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line of Fire) and screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool are fiendishly inventive in their efforts to keep you anxious and involved. And they are brazenly audacious in their willingness to pump up the paranoia at every opportunity.
How audacious? Consider this: Outbreak is the story of a highly contagious, horrendously deadly virus that is inadvertently carried from a remote African village to a California coastal community. But the virus doesn’t start to spread throughout the entire town until an early victim coughs while in the audience of the local movie theater. After that, all hell breaks loose.
Can you imagine how jumpy people will be at each Outbreak screening every time someone in the audience simply clears his throat? Can you imagine how much the filmmakers were pleased with themselves when they imagined this?
Outbreak is insidiously plausible and engrossingly logical almost every step of the way as it presents a worst-case scenario that involves a nightmarish medical catastrophe, a frantic search for an anti-viral serum and a high-level cover-up by image-conscious military officials. The tension is nail-bitingly intense; the AIDS parallels are understated but unsettling.
Occasionally, the movie’s breakneck pace is slowed by a speed-bump of improbability, most notably when White House staffers consider a radical solution to the virus problem. And things threaten to turn downright silly as two good guys miraculously evade pursuit by Army helicopters while zipping around San Francisco in search of important information.
But even then, the movie benefits greatly from the work of an unusually strong cast. The actors are more than convincing enough to make you accept what is hard to believe. And when they’re dealing with the easy-to-believe stuff, they are positively riveting.
Dustin Hoffman is first among equals here, giving an authoritative and effectively nuanced performance as Col. Sam Adams, a U.S. Army medical researcher. Adams is the one who discovers the new virus, a deadly strain identified as ”Motaba,” in an African village where the entire population is either dead or dying. And it is Adams who first sounds the warning that Motaba could spread to the United States. Naturally, his dire predictions are ignored.
But then a Motaba-infected monkey is captured in the jungle and transported to California. One thing leads to another, allowing the virus to travel and, worse, mutate. Very soon, lots of people in the community of Cedar Creek are complaining about terrible flu-like symptoms. Their agonies increase, the body count mounts. By the time Adams and his team arrive, the town has been sealed off by an Army blockade.
Donald Sutherland is far too transparent in his villainy as an Army general who wants to destroy all trace of the virus, the infected townspeople and anything else that might compromise a top-secret biological-weapons program. (You didn’t really think Motaba was a natural disaster, did you?) But, then again, he is simply playing the role as it is written. The movie might have been even more powerful if Sutherland’s character were more complex than a B-movie heavy — if, indeed, he sounded perfectly reasonable as he proposed destroying Cedar Creek to save the rest of humanity.
The other actors and their characters are everything they need to be for Outbreak to work at maximum potential. In addition to Hoffman, who is splendid, the cast includes Rene Russo as a brilliant government scientist who just happens to be Adams’ ex-wife; Morgan Freeman as Adams’ stern but sympathetic commander; Kevin Spacey as a veteran Army epidemiologist on Adams’ team; and Cuba Gooding Jr. as a rookie scientist who, not coincidentally, also is a crack helicopter pilot. Such versatility always comes in very handy in a movie like this.
