Outbreak. - movie reviews

National Review, April 17, 1995 by John Simon

WHY ARE disaster movies almost always disasters? A disaster must be treated coolly, in documentary fashion, to ring true. But Hollywood dreads documentaries, and assumes that people want a rattling good story with characters they can ``identify with.'' And that is how trouble is born: Outbreak, which could have been a good disaster film, is an artistic catastrophe.

Part of the problem may be that the director, Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), is German, and unaware of just how bad the screenplay by Lawrence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool is. Still, someone who has spent as much time in Hollywood as Mr. Petersen should be able to recognize drivel when he sees it. Actually, the best part of the film is the beginning, where we are led, documentary fashion, through different laboratories devoted to the study of ever more contagious diseases, until we reach the fourth level -- those for which there is no known cure.

Outbreak, then, is not content to tell the story of a deadly virus, a hemorrhagic fever here called motaba, that spreads through the air and is incurable. It is brought into the United States in the body of a capuchin monkey, a creature unaffected by the destruction it is host to. The animal escapes into the California woods, and soon an entire town is quarantined and, worse than that, scheduled to be bombed to Kingdom Come with the President's approval. All this would seem excitement enough, but Petersen and his writers must invent a) a divorced couple, Colonel Sam Daniels and his ex-wife, Robby, still in love with each other as they cutely fight over the custody of their two big, floppy dogs, even though they -- the couple, not the dogs -- are the only ones who could halt this holocaust (don't ask me why); and b) the existence of a serum that General McClintock and his cohorts refuse to make known, because the Army intends to use this disease in future germ warfare, and wants to be the only one with access to a cure -- in other words, a conspiracy theory, that old standby.

To make matters worse, because Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) is such a superhero, he alone can foil McClintock's deadly game; so the general (Donald Sutherland) is determined to remove him from the scene -- when other means fail, by ordering him shot on sight by anyone who spots him. Then Robby, the Saint Joan of the Communicable Disease Center, gets motaba and starts dying of it, albeit at a speed considerably slower than anyone else, which allows -- you guessed it -- for a happy ending. It turns out that there is nothing like hemorrhagic fever to bring divorced spouses back together. Incidentally, though people are dying with horrendous symptoms right and left, no child ever does: our filmmakers know exactly what a red-blooded American audience will tolerate, and what it won't.

Petersen gives us a whole aerial circus worth of helicopter chases, a teasing exposure of a darling little girl to danger you know will no more touch her than the Loch Ness monster, an American general evil enough to qualify for Saddam Hussein's High Command (and what is more evil than Donald Sutherland, dishonest white hair and all, hamming it up?), and Sam and Robby's wisecracking sidekick, Major Casey Schuler -- who naturally gets the disease, stops wisecracking, and dies nobly off camera, having tried with his penultimate breath to bring the divorced spouses together via a few deathbed wisecracks. And much more of the sort.

Mr. Hoffman is an unlikely candidate for this sort of movie -- with his short stature, slitty eyes, gravelly voice, and a leading lady (the good Rene Russo) a head taller than himself. Morgan Freeman plays another general, who, however, sees the light in the end; Kevin Spacey (Casey) is suitably wry until he turns, equally suitably, to mush; and Cuba Gooding Jr. is Sam's fearless and matchless helicopter pilot. But this is a movie not for actors, only for special effects. Those, indeed, are flawless, as is Michael Ballhaus's customarily cool cinematography, and the fine production design of William Sandell. But then comes that old fly in the ointment, the score, in this case by James Newton Howard, whose blustering foreground music saws the ear as a poor actor's arms do the air.