For those who have been stressing lately over deadly earthquakes and hurricanes, worry instead about tiny viruses that travel with unexpected speed around the globe transported by a cough or a handshake.
Oh, to have the surgical mask concession at movie theaters showing Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a star-packed exercise in medical paranoia told with a muted style instead of melodrama, preferring science to sensationalism. That documentary-like tonal choice is likely to lose the film some box office, but it results in a cumulative sense of dread, as the epidemic spreads around the world and society breaks down into rioting mobs, that is more dramatically effective.
Soderbergh again demonstrates a remarkable ability to lure A-list actors to his projects. Gwyneth Paltrow plays an international marketing executive who travels to Hong Kong for work, becoming infected there and bringing the virus home with her. Matt Damon is her unnerved husband who has a fluke immunity to the disease. Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet play operatives of Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control, juggling science and politics.
Marion Cotillard joins the sleuthing effort, trying to track down the virus’ source and vaccine for the World Health Organization. If there is a human villain, it is Jude Law, a weasely blogger whose goal seem to be profiting from the panic.
Contagion brings to mind an earlier film on a similar subject, 1995’s Outbreak, but Soderbergh is more interested in getting the factual details right, even at the expense of cinematic jolts. This may lead to less of a conventional thriller than most disaster movies, but it imagines how such an epidemic would really play out, which ultimately is more unnerving. Grab some hand sanitizer and see Contagion.
CONTAGION. Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard; Rating: PG-13.
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Taking a page from last year’s boxing film, The Fighter, Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior hooks us in with its characters and their conflicts with each other, which trumps the sports drama and its inevitable clichés.
The sport is this case is mixed martial arts, an anything goes combination of boxing, wrestling and animalistic mayhem, which happens fittingly inside a chain link cage. Brutal in the extreme, it attracts a crowd of blood-thirsty spectators, which presumably will be replicated by a movie audience drawn to the catnip of violence.
But Warrior also has a compelling story line, about two brothers — one a recent Iraq War veteran, the other a high school physics teacher — both estranged from their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) and with seething resentments to each other. For varying reasons, both brothers are strapped for cash and drawn to a $5 million jackpot MMA tournament called Sparta.
Although it is said to attract fighters from around the world, these two blue-collar Pittsburgh brothers improbably make the cut into the field of 16 and, yes, you guessed it, they eventually are matched up in the cage against each other in Atlantic City.
Grizzly Nolte does not stray far from his usual rumpled performance, but he is well-cast as the father seeking sobriety and reconciliation. Brit hulk Tom Hardy (Inception) makes a strong impression as soldier Tommy, bull-headed and brimming with brute strength, as does Aussie Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) as family man and academic Brendan. Both their acting skills and physical prowess are well showcased, and future film careers of prominence seem likely for each of them.
Warrior undeniably packs a punch — and a kick and a gouge — in its mixed martial arts scenes, as well as its family warfare.
WARRIOR. Director: Gavin O’Connor; Cast: Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Morrison; Rated: PG-13.