Review of Outbreak (1995) by Filipeneto — 10 Feb 2019

Unrealistic, unreliable, but entertaining the audience.

Made in 1995, this movie still seems very current. The issue is the ever-present danger of a global pandemic. In this case, the script brings to the womb of rural America a new African disease, through a single infected monkey. Of course, the military is called and, as often happens in crisis scenarios in American cinema (eg, "The Siege"), turn out to be the real villains of the film, with more than half of the plot around the attempts to prevent the military from doing more harm than good.

I think I could rate this film in the field of so-called "disaster films," even though this disaster was partly caused by humans. The script is good, even though it overdoes the events, paint the characters in "good" and "bad" in an absolutely artificial way and make the facts unbelievable and not very plausible. Much of the outcome of the film (which I will not disclose) is pure luck to the main character. He was so lucky that he would be able to find a tiny needle in a haystack the size of New York if need be. For those who need some realism and credibility to like a movie, this can be a problem.

Dustin Hoffman is a good actor, but I think he allowed too much that his character emptied of all the personality that could have had. He is a paper, artificial and cliché hero. And that could be said of all the characters in the cast. The poverty of the script, poorly thought out and built too imaginatively, is clearly reflected in the poor construction of the characters, something that even the best and most talented actor could not remedy. Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland (in yet another military villain character) ... good actors with little or no material to work with.

Basically, this movie is a disastrous disaster film. It could be much better with a more judicious and more realistic script, with well thought out characters, with higher doses of reality. This did not happen, but it does not, however, prevent this film from being interesting, especially from the point of view of pure entertainment. It's a movie that entertains if you do not think too much and simply get carried away.