When a film starts with a man unintentionally killing his young family with an immediately-fatal virus within the first couple of minutes you know that A) you're in a world that bears only a passing resemblance to reality and B) you're probably going to wish you hadn't bothered watching it by the time the film is over. I started watching mostly because William Hurt is a quality actor (it's unfathomable to me why he would accept such a badly-written part in such a ludicrously told story) and also because I have a weakness for killer virus stories even though this genre of film is rarely worth the effort. Even a relatively ambitious project like Mick Garris's TV adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand was disappointing in the extreme.
Anyway, I soldiered on, and increasingly began feeling as if a creeping virus were taking over my own body. One that made me at first restless and then sleepy. After the film's prologue in golden California we are transported to the cold grey winter of Budapest, presumably because production costs are cheaper there. A lab worker (Peter Weller, virtually unrecognisable from his Robocop days) accidentally becomes infected with the virus but, like Hurt's character, is able to live for a week or so as a carrier while those he touches die within a minute of contact. Hurt shows up, looking a little geeky it has to be said, with long hair and no hairpiece, to at first lock horns with Natasha McElhone before they join forces to track down Weller (who, bizarrely, goes on the run with a large model airplane) with whom.Hurt shares an increasing affinity.
Things get progressively sillier as the film blunders towards its daft climax, and we are left to (presumably) cheer two 'heroes' who gleefully infect a hardnosed government agent with the very virus they had been attempting to stop Weller from spreading. Weller and McElhone belong to that breed of second-string actors who live off the pickings those higher up the pecking order instantly dismiss, but William Hurt is clearly slumming here, and presumably only in it for the money a fact which is almost as disappointing as this film.
Anyway, I soldiered on, and increasingly began feeling as if a creeping virus were taking over my own body. One that made me at first restless and then sleepy. After the film's prologue in golden California we are transported to the cold grey winter of Budapest, presumably because production costs are cheaper there. A lab worker (Peter Weller, virtually unrecognisable from his Robocop days) accidentally becomes infected with the virus but, like Hurt's character, is able to live for a week or so as a carrier while those he touches die within a minute of contact. Hurt shows up, looking a little geeky it has to be said, with long hair and no hairpiece, to at first lock horns with Natasha McElhone before they join forces to track down Weller (who, bizarrely, goes on the run with a large model airplane) with whom.Hurt shares an increasing affinity.
Things get progressively sillier as the film blunders towards its daft climax, and we are left to (presumably) cheer two 'heroes' who gleefully infect a hardnosed government agent with the very virus they had been attempting to stop Weller from spreading. Weller and McElhone belong to that breed of second-string actors who live off the pickings those higher up the pecking order instantly dismiss, but William Hurt is clearly slumming here, and presumably only in it for the money a fact which is almost as disappointing as this film.