A curious mix of good and bad. Good wins.

Rating: 7/10 (4 November 2000)

I know the criticism I'm about to make is not a deep one, but really: it would have cost them NOTHING to make the medical science more plausible, so why didn't they? Inaccuracies range from those research would have cleared up (viruses use RNA, not DNA), through those a moment's thought would have cleared up (how can a virus which is fatal in less than two days, and almost impossible to transmit, cause an epidemic?), to those which are just loopy (how can there be a disease which becomes incurable after EXACTLY twenty hours, to the MINUTE, whatever the sex, size, age or initial state of health of the person infected?).
Anyway: it's still amazing stuff. All that heart-stopping rock climbing at the beginning and slow motion photography - PROPER slow-motion photography, which never feels as if it's dragging its heels. At once exhilarating and suspenseful. My only previous exposure to Woo had been the execrable "Face/Off". It goes without saying that this film is a hundred times better. (It IS a mystery to me why people were so excited about it in advance: as I said, Woo's previous Hollywood effort had shown no grounds for hope at all, and it's not as if anyone liked the original "Mission: Impossible". I guess it's one of those hype things I'll never understand.) -Sure, the token woman was very hard to take: an unlovable drifter of no fixed abode or accent, and if she was REALLY in love with Ethan Hunt, I renounce any claim to being able to read anyone's state of mind. And some of the lines ... dear oh dear. I don't think the gliding, enfolding cinematography EXCUSES these faults, but it's more than enough to make the film worth watching.