Army medic Col. Sam Daniels (Hoffman) heads a team of ““disease cowboys,’’ as they’re called in Laurie Garrett’s book ““The Coming Plague,’’ which along with Richard Preston’s ““The Hot Zone’’ sparked the current interest in the viral menace. Through its first half, ““Outbreak’’ is a gripping genre movie about these intrepid doctors. Director Wolfgang Petersen (““In the Line of Fire’’) knows how to make a pleasurable wreck of your nervous system with his kinetic camera and triphammer editing. He whirls you through a formulaic but irresistible narrative that has Daniels and his sidekicks battling not only the mutating virus but the mutating duplicity of the army brass, in the persons of General Ford (Morgan Freeman) and General McClintock (Donald Sutherland). To contain the plague before it spreads across the country, these Hippocratic hypocrites have prescribed the ultimate unthinkable dosage (take one Kaboom and get lots of sleep). To head off this therapeutic apocalypse, the desperate Daniels takes off in a chopper to search for the escaped ““host’’ monkey, which would supply the antibodies for a serum.
At this point ““Outbreak’’ becomes ““Breakdown.’’ The screenplay, credited to Lawrence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool (but mutated by several other writers), collapses into a series of world-record implausibilities. The president agrees to subtract one town from the U.S. atlas. Daniels’s pilot, a young doctor, outmaneuvers a guy who’s been introduced as ““the best damn pilot in this man’s army.’’ To lure the lethally infected monkey, an unprotected little girl is sent out, making kitchy-koo noises. The army chain of command melts down into a ludicrous succession of insubordinations. Petersen even spoils his aerial-stunt scenes by inserting shots of Daniels in his chopper, obviously shot on a sound stage with projected backgrounds, breaking the momentum with palpable fakery.
Good thrillers may ask you to suspend your disbelief, but not your intelligence. ““In the Line of Fire’’ was a model of its kind. With ““Outbreak’’ you could say Petersen trivializes a major world health problem just for thrills, but if ““Outbreak’’ tingled your spine without betraying your brain, well, that’s entertainment. Genre movies are fun because they take us into some recognizable world and excite us by threatening that world. Are Daniels and his ex-wife Robby gonna get back together? Will one of them catch the plague? It’s fun to see our corny hopes answered with style. But not even the intelligent intensity of Hoffman and the warm appeal of Russo (or the architectural splendors of her face in giant close-up) can override the plague of inanity that overtakes ““Outbreak.’’ Scientists now think that these microorganisms are man’s ultimate adversaries. If they take over the planet, one consolation will be that viruses don’t make silly movies.
