'OUTBREAK' ....HOLLYWOOD GERMS GET THEIR TINY ASSES KICKED

Outbreak (1995)   Couldn't help ourselves........this one seemed like such a natural to revisit in the midst the Coronavirus crisis........

             On some primal level, it's entertaining to watch.......it is, after all, a typical machine-tooled, expertly crafted Hollywood product.....smoothly directed by Wolfgang ('Das Boot') Peterson, who, like fellow compatriot Roland Emmerich, enjoyed a career as a big-budget pulp fictioneer.... ("Air Force One", "Troy", "The Perfect Storm", "Poseidon")

                This movie came out a winner in its fierce competition to hit theaters first before a planned film version of the non-fiction best-seller "The Hot Zone" (about the discovery of the deadly Ebola virus and attempts to contain it...….)

                "The Hot Zone" film, which was to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, folded its tent, leaving the 'Outbreak' crew free to create their very own killer-virus-comes-to-America thriller.......modeled after the atomic-mutation-on-the-loose movies from the 1950's.....

                The first half is the best, urgent and suspenseful.......involving a grungy smuggler played by  Patrick Dempsey. Hoping for some quick cash from a pet store owner, Dempsey sneaks an adorable little African monkey into the U.S...…...unaware the creature carries the kiss-of-death, 'Motoba' virus......which puts you in a body bag faster than you can gulp down an aspirin....

                No question we're headed for 'We're all gonna die' time.......as the chattering simian spreads the infection to  Dempsey, his girlfriend and hundreds and hundreds of others, all of them going from sniffles to death in 24 hours.......

                (You may never set foot in a movie theater again, at the sight of one guy's sneeze sending droplets of the death-sentence germ into everybody else's mouth......)

                The second half of the movie then lurches into all too typical Friday-Night-At-The-Multiplex action fantasy........as our fearless germ commandos (Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr., Kevin Spacey, Rene Russo) desperately search for a way to stop the rampaging microbes from slaughtering people faster than Godzilla and King Ghidorah......

                 Not helping this dire situation is a vile, heartless Army general (Donald Sutherland, phoning it in) who plans to drop a jumbo nuke-like firebomb on the infected town, thereby wiping out the virus along with the entire population.......just to be on the safe side.

                 Then cue the outrageous, improbable heroics......as Hoffman and Gooding Jr. swipe a copter and not only track down the monkey and extract a cure from its blood, but  then engage in an acrobatic aerial duel with Sutherland's  bomb-carrying plane on its way to blow up the sick folk so they don't sneeze on anyone else....ever........uh, yeah, right.

                   Utter popcorn-munchin' nonsense, but we weren't bored for one second and the top-of-the-line cast gives it their all...…..including Morgan Freeman as another Army general whose ambivalence about mass-exploding sick people holds steady until the crucial final moment...….

                  As unnerving as the scenes in "Outbreak" are, nothing can compare, for genuine fear and loathing, with the sight of our Dear Leader, Baby Orange (the very stable genius who knows everything about everything) coping with Coronavirus...….'coping' in Baby Orange speak, means the usual steady stream of lies and misinformation...…

                     Even the writers of "Outbreak" couldn't conceive of  a catastrophic event like the one unfolding now in real time...….a disease-stricken nation looking in vain for intelligence and leadership from a clueless moron...…

                     For the movie, 3 pumps of the hand sanitizer (***)...…...For Baby Orange and his ludicrous mishandling of the first crisis that he himself didn't cause......as always  Minus Infinity.....