Hoffman, as an Army medical researcher, is dispatched by his commanding officer (Freeman) to check out a deadly virus in the rain forests of Zaire. There he and confreres Spacey and Gooding find an entire village decimated by the killer bug. Hoffman, brilliant yet hotheaded, warns his superiors and his ex-wife (Russo), a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control, that the murderous microbe may have already made its way stateside. He's overreacting, they tell him.
Suddenly residents of a small California town come down with flulike symptoms that give way to massive organ failure, which kills them in the same horrifying fashion as the virus victims in Zaire. Hoffman and Russo join forces with Gooding to track down the disease's host, figure out its method of transmission and, they hope, come up with a cure. Along the way, they discover another surprise.
The principals play splendidly off each other, but Outbreak, which sometimes recalls 1970's The Andromeda Strain, often strains for effect. There are flare-ups of B-movie dialogue ("They're going to sit there and watch those innocent people die!") and some foolishly contrived, flag-waving speeches. Sutherland, as a tunnel-visioned Army general, is once again saddled with the role of the stereotypical villain. But the strength of the sharply written and directed Outbreak is its ability to make the audience willingly, eagerly—and breathlessly—suspend disbelief until the credits crawl. (R)
Jack Thompson, Russell Crowe
This adaptation of the off-Broadway play is so brave, so honest, so life-affirming, so vacuous. Bearing in mind the crowded couches on talk shows and in therapists' offices, Thompson is that rare breed of dad indeed: totally accepting of his twenty-something plumber son (Crowe) and the son's homosexuality. Thompson buys Crowe erotic magazines and offers drinks to a man (John Polson) Crowe has long fancied and has finally brought 'round to the family's small home in Sydney. Bidding Crowe and his would-be lover good night, dear old Dad cheerfully signs off with, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do." Crowe isn't the only one looking for romance. When Thompson, a middle-aged widower, meets a companionable divorcee (Deborah Kennedy), he tells her everything about himself—except the fact that his son is gay (or, as Thompson likes to put it, "cheerful"). Kennedy's reaction when he does break the news sets into motion a series of events that changes forever the relationship between father and son.
But what is meant to be comic too often comes off as nudge-nudge, wink-wink arch. What is meant to be poignant and dramatic is, instead, precious and melodramatic. However well-meaning and earnestly performed, The Sum of Us doesn't add up to much. (Not rated)
Jessica Lange, Halle Berry, David Strathairn
This laborious chronicle of a child-custody battle begins with a crack-addicted infant being left in a Chicago projects dumpster by his mother (Berry), who then goes off to buy drugs. Discovered by sanitation workers, the baby is brought to the hospital, where his tenacity profoundly moves a social worker (Lange). With barely a word of caution or protest from her husband (Strathairn), Lange, the mother of an adolescent (Daisy Eagan), decides to adopt the foundling (played as a 4-year-old by Marc John Jefferies).
After Berry has successfully gone through drug rehab and learns that her son is alive and living in the suburbs with his adopted family, she is galvanized to win him back. Lange is just as fiercely determined to keep him.
As all the media attention about Baby Jessica demonstrated, the issue of birth mother vs. adoptive mother is explosive and polarizing. That in the case of Losing Isaiah it's a black birth mother vs. a white adoptive mother should render matters that much more incendiary. But this turgid, flat-footed movie insists on having things both ways. First, it appears to say that a biological mother, however horrific her past acts, has the right to her child. Then, shifting seismically, the film suggests that the child belongs with the woman who saved and raised him, the only woman he has ever called Mommy.
Lange and Berry play their roles with admirable fervor; Samuel L. Jackson, as Berry's lawyer, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as her persistent suitor, add heft to the production. But Losing Isaiah never manages to find itself. (R)
Robert Englund
After a laundry worker is injured and another fatally squashed, her blood, guts and brains oozing from between the giant metal rollers of a hulking Hadley Watson Model-6 Steamer Ironer and Folder, an investigator mutters, "It's almost like that machine had tasted blood and liked it."
Bingo! This malevolent mass of metal resides in a Dickensian laundry run by an evil old coot (Englund, hidden behind layers of latex even thicker than his Freddy Krueger makeup in the Nightmare on Elm Street films). He's eager to provide the machine with McMortal meals.
There's naught to recommend in Mangler (based on a Stephen King story) other than—and you should be ashamed if this is what you want—its many gory shots of arms, heads and bodies being crushed and, my personal favorite, a dying man hocking bloody sputum directly onto the camera lens. (R)
- Contributors:
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
