THIS VIRUS ISN'T CATCHING

By RICHARD CORLISS

YOUNG, GUNG-HO MAJOR SALT (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is eager to impress his bosses by describing the fatal cunning of the Motaba virus-how it rapidly turns a healthy body into a bloody, pustulous corpse. "That's very good, Major," says Colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) wryly. "We've read that in a book too."

Not quite. They--or, rather, producer Arnold Kopelson--read it in a New Yorker article in 1992. "Crisis in the Hot Zone," Richard Preston's true story about the near escape of the Ebola virus from a Virginia lab, threw Hollywood into a bidding frenzy, and Kopelson was one of the pursuers. When Preston sold his rights to 20th Century Fox, Kopelson decided to make a fictional plague film, Outbreak. It scurried into production while the Hot Zone project dithered in development and then aborted. So if you want to see a virus epic, Outbreak is it.

What you get is a big, bustling, intermittently dippy melodrama that takes the Preston premise a few steps further. The virus becomes airborne and infects a California town. Now sneezing in a crowded theater can spread an instant epidemic. And a cute monkey may be the innocent agent of genocide.

Sam, an Army doctor, is the only person with the expertise, the guts and, dammit, the nobility to solve this apocalyptic poser. Screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool have given him a requisition brainy-dishy ex-wife (Rene Russo), an agitated boss (Morgan Freeman), a helpful colleague (Kevin Spacey, who is very good) and plucky Major Salt to steer Sam through an unlikely airplane battle at the climax. But in movies like this, a man must stand alone. It's a mild hoot to watch Certified Great Actor Hoffman play an action hero. Note the Clint-like glint in his eyes, the terse authority he gives such endearingly daft phrases as "Idiocy is our only option."

Sam could stanch the epidemic in a trice were it not for that old bogeyman the nut case Army general (Donald Sutherland, eyes rolling goofily). Appar-ently a killer virus, the threat of plague, a White House crisis-oh, and a pretty blond child set up for a big bad monkey bite-aren't enough for one doomsday movie; the military has to go bats as well. We can only surmise that back in 1986, when he produced Platoon, Kopelson contracted a deadly strain of the con-spiracy virus from Oliver Stone.

Director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, In the Line of Fire) handles it all proficiently and at times artfully, as in two elaborate tracking shots that reveal various levels of biological contamination and the spread of the disease through hospital vents. Still, the whole operation looks musclebound. Outbreak is really about the lumbering, quasimilitary maneuvers that go into big-budget filmmaking. If Preston's virus story were a virus, the Outbreak team would aim an H-bomb at it. And the Hot Zone people would be sitting around apprehensively, waiting for it to develop.