A medical thriller dealing with the all-too-real threat of unstoppable plague, this film has a good premise alongside Hollywood-style execution. For me, the best parts of the film were where we see how the virus spreads among the unsuspecting - a scratch, a sneeze, or a cough. In the film's most celebrated sequence, a carrier coughs into a packed cinema, and we watch the particles zoom through the air before being inhaled by somebody who should have kept their mouth shut. This method of "quiet death" is extremely frightening and believable, and makes you feel like locking your doors and staying inside for the rest of your life.

Elsewhere, it's business as usual, with a shouty Dustin Hoffman running around ignoring his superiors and doing his darnedest to try and save lives. The reliable Morgan Freeman appears as Hoffman's long-suffering superior, while Donald Sutherland makes the best of his villainously evil role. In fact, he's so good at it that I'm surprised he hasn't been cast more frequently as the bad guy - but then again his over the top performance in VIRUS may be the reason why. Rene Russo is around to provide a love interest and a woman in peril, and a pre-fame Kevin Spacey is good in the small role of a virologist who has a nasty accident in the lab.

The problem with this film is it's length: at two hours plus, it does drag at some points during the middle of the film. Some of the sentimentalising between Hoffman and Russo could easily have been chopped without harming the flow of the film. Thankfully, things regain interest with the action-filled finale, with Hoffman and Cuba Gooding, Jr. getting into a helicopter fight with the evil Sutherland and trying to deliver the vaccine before the town gets nuked. You can guess the ending (this is a Hollywood film, you see) but it's still pretty exciting. Horror fans should come along for the ride to witness a different kind of horror, and there are plenty of diseased bodies laying around to make you feel ill. This is a good example of a thriller with a different premise, only spoiled slightly by the excessive length. A good Saturday night slice of entertainment.

In a jungle war camp deep in Africa, an outbreak of a deadly virus has occurred. After getting a sample, the doctors promise to bring back help. Only a plane returns with a massive bomb that obliterates the entire camp. Now in modern times, there is another outbreak in the area. Colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) is sent in to investigate. His ex-wife Roberta Keough (Rene Russo) is leaving to work at the CDC in Atlanta. Then a monkey is caught, transported to America on a freighter, and the virus starts to spread.

It seems like they got all the material from the CDC and whatever other publications they could get their hands on. Then the writers put it in a blender, and give the resulting script to director Wolfgang Petersen. It's not really compelling or thrilling as a story. And the resolution or the climax of the movie is as hokey as it could be. Dustin Hoffman tries a little bit of an action hero scientist type. He's not good in the action role, but he is good as the cerebral type. The movie keeps trying to be an action movie, but it never really works as such.

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.