Outbreak Movie

Outbreak
Rating:
Run Time: 130 min
MPAA Rating: R
Released: 1995
Directors: Wolfgang Petersen
Genre/Type: Science Fiction
Thriller
Action Thriller
Disaster Film
Producers: Gail Katz
Arnold Kopelson
Wolfgang Petersen
Plot Synopsis by Mark Deming
A handful of scientists struggle to prevent the destruction of a small town -- and possibly the entire country -- in this suspense drama. In the mid-1960s, a deadly virus is discovered in Zaire that wipes out an entire village in 24 hours. Government researchers are brought in to investigate, but the military opts to destroy the village rather than risk further infection. Thirty years later, Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman), an expert on contagious diseases, is called in when the virus re-emerges in Africa. A monkey carrying the bug is smuggled into the U.S., and a suburban California town soon begins to succumb to the illness. Sam scrambles to find an antidote with the help of his ex-wife Robby (Rene Russo), a Center for Disease Control researcher, and their colleague Casey (Kevin Spacey), while Gen. McClintock (Donald Sutherland) has his own reasons for wanting to use bombs to contain the epidemic, and Army surgeon Gen. Ford (Morgan Freeman) is caught in the middle. Outbreak was produced in the hopes of beating the film version of Richard Preston's bestseller (about a real-life epidemic) into theaters; script problems shelved , and Outbreak had the infectious disease market to itself.

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Cast

Actors Character Born
Dustin Hoffman Sam Daniels Aug 8, 1937 in Los Angeles, CA
Rene Russo Robby Keough Feb 17, 1954 in Los Angeles, CA
Morgan Freeman Gen. Billy Ford Jun 1, 1937 in Memphis, TN
Kevin Spacey Casey Schuler Jul 26, 1959 in South Orange, NJ
Cuba Gooding, Jr. Maj. Salt Jan 2, 1968 in South Bronx, NY
Donald Sutherland Gen. Donald McClintock Jul 17, 1934 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
Mark Brown Officer
Dana Anderson Corinne
Patricia Place Mrs Foote
Lance Kerwin American Mercenary Nov 6, 1960 in Newport Beach, CA
Zakes Mokae Dr. Benjamin Iwabi Aug 5, 1934 in Johannesburg, South Africa
Patrick Dempsey Jimbo Scott Jan 13, 1966 in Lewiston, ME
Bill Stevenson Biotest Guard Sep 10, 1963
Gordon Michaels Man in LIne
Ed Beechner Gunner
Diana Bellamy Mrs Pananides
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Back to the topReview

Review by Nick Sambides, Jr.
Morgan Freeman isn't the star of Outbreak, but his performance, and the legerdemain of director Wolfgang Petersen, make this noteworthy as a character study and a suspense thriller. Petersen, the director of Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, and The Perfect Storm, is an old hand at mixing characterization and action. What is pleasantly surprising about Petersen's direction (and the script by Robert Roy Poole) is how smoothly both manage a shift from a gripping, almost documentary depiction of the horrors of a biological weapon run amuck to a suspenseful, action movie-ish finish. Petersen -- through stars Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Kevin Spacey -- shows the terrible anguish that this plague can wreak on a small California town. For more than an hour, Petersen illuminates the terrible choices the scientists and politicians face as the plague spreads. These sequences are capped by a powerful cameo from an uncredited J.T. Walsh as a furious and highly scrupulous White House chief of staff who forces the people deciding to firebomb the town to look at pictures of the people they will be killing. The action portion of the movie is more melodramatic, and perhaps less successful (Hoffman's banter with Gooding seems forced), but comes as a relief after the gloom of the first hour. As the general who helped launch the weapon and must contain it, Freeman shows the dilemma of a good man caught in a nightmarish web of events.

Outbreak on TV

Zip Code: 10010 · Provider: Verizon Fios Freehold NY Plus-Digital (Jersey City) Edit
Dec 2 , 9:00 PM ET · Outbreak  · Channel 492 · WPXNDT3 · Duration: 180 min.
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