VIRUS (1999)
It ain't no Deep Rising
...because Deep Rising just ruled, baby. It pretty much had it all - a great monster, good action, a number of laughs, an amusingly charming hero and adorable heroine, gore, slime, a wonderful sense of fun, and one of the best final shots of any movie along these lines in a long time.
But Virus...well, it ain't all bad, but it had potential for so much more.
The crew of a tugboat loses a very valuable barge in a typhoon - more valuable to some than others (the captain has foolishly leveraged everything he owns against it). They barely get to the eye of the storm in one piece, but facing the possibility of financial destitution, they can't resist the temptation to claim an apparently abandoned Russian research vessel as salvage.
(note: my brother's cinematic pet peeve is how you hear that deep, rumbling chorus every time a movie takes a scene into Russia. This is how the movie started from the first frame. "Fuckin' Russian chorus..." could be heard by most of the audience.)
Of course, we know it's not really abandoned - it's got a foxy Russian scientist, and, apparently, the Borg collective on board. The rest, you can pretty much figure out.
There's no real surprises here - the plot clops along as expected, people die just when we expect them to, and it's all done with too much seriousness. At least DR wanted you to smile throughout - this one's a little more sincere in its attempt to scare you, but when it's done this clumsily, it just isn't as much fun.
Jamie Lee Curtis is pretty good as the crew member with a conscience (possibly the only one) - Donald Sutherland, however, has never been worse as the captain (he starts the movie with this cheesy Captain Highliner accent, which fades after a couple of scenes, ahhr, ahhr). The rest of the cast is nondescript. Third billing should have gone to that Maori guy's facial tattoos.
The real stars of the movie, of course, are the robots and cyborgs that the invading "electrical lifeform" creates. The creation of the cyborgs makes for some nice gore and icky moments ("Love what you've done with him, considering that he hasn't got a head."), but none of them really convince as being particularly motile. They just look like animatronics. However, the (CGI, I guess) hulking major robots with no apparent organic components are done quite well.
There's also a pointless, logically unsupportable scene where the crew talks to the cyber-being through a keyboard, and its answers of course come in a deep, rumbling, distorted death metal grumble. It doesn't really tell us anything except its motive, which really is pretty much incidental and only really serves to give the title a minor twist (i.e. as you've probably already heard, the virus is man).
There's some good effects and a couple of exciting moments, but nothing to rush out and see. Wait for the second- run theaters.