Outbreak (1995)

Excellent but underrated film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There is an excellent idea here, and wonderful actors to play it out, but the storyline is too complicated for this film's good. The bizarre subplot involving a nefarious military doctor trying to cover up crimes of 30 years earlier, aiming to sacrifice thousands of lives to save his own reputation and neck -- well, it seems to me it just wasn't necessary. The more simple story line of an Ebola-type illness traveling from an obscure African war zone to a cozy California community -- that's more than enough to intrigue a movie audience!This film does a good job of showing how a virus could conceivably make its way to the American homeland through the actions of a few people making a few short-sighted, self-serving decisions. The movie is at its scary best when it shows the terrible implications of such seemingly benign acts as taking a cute animal out of its natural environment and kissing at the airport.Dustin Hoffman carries this film despite its many flaws. Observing how he single handedly tracks down the original host of the deadly microbe -- risking his job, saving the life of his ex-wife, and winning her back to his affections along the way -- is part of the fun and turns him into an everyman's super-hero. I'm glad I saw "Outbreak." It's interesting consider its similarities with the similarly themed "Contagion." Each succeeds in scaring you, getting you to care about the principals, and teaching you something about infectious disease. But neither is a movie for the ages.

This is a real potboiler. It's another one of those films that has so many contrivances that it's hard to keep track of it all. It is also laden with incredible incompetence by so many people whose lives and positions revolve around absolute care and precaution. People are practically running into each other trying to do the next thing. Torn suits (why bother to wear them), accidental injections, escaping monkeys, kisses of death, are just part of the craziness, not to mention the motivations of the bad guys. And finally, there is that battle in the air. The actors are some of the best, but the plotting and happenstance are really too much.

An Ebola-like but (naturally) even more lethal virus nearly wipes out an American town (with the help of the army), but Dustin Hoffman grabs the monkey (the primary host of the virus) by the neck and produces a life-saving anti-serum in no time, saving the world and his marriage, as well (thanks to the fact that his soon-to-be ex agonises a little more patiently than the others).It sounds pretty dumb, but thanks to the decent script, the fine actors (you can rarely go wrong with Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman), the good pacing and the simple, but effective direction, Outbreak is actually a satisfying thriller that remains semi-plausible throughout and never gets boring. That's saying a lot, because most films in the genre are unable to keep up the tension and lack even a dash of realism. Outbreak does grab your attention, outlines a realistic scenario, and keeps you on the edge of your seat till the end.Unfortunately, the last third of the film is drenched in the usual clichés — world-saving hero vs. pigheaded, war-obsessed military commander, deus ex machina supplied in abundance, mandatory happy ending, etc. —, but the competent execution ensures solid entertainment for the whole two hours. And with the climate change and the terrifying prospect of deadly diseases spreading to territories previously considered 'safe', the topic remains as relevant as ever.

Outbreak is what I would describe as an extra-ordinary movie, full of badly directed extras doing incomprehensible things. Are we expected to believe that people in an infected area will become so enraged that they will attack their helpers for no reason? And the events leading to the outbreak are risible. A hospital lab worker who is so engrossed in a radio sport commentary that he puts his hand into a centrifuge without switching it off. An emergency department doctor who screams at his patients to get better. He'd die of nervous exhaustion in a week in any busy ED.What are all these great actors doing in this mess?