New York, alerte à la peste

As an epidemiologist, I say any movie that features an epidemiologist as heroine can't be all bad!

Actually, the disease scenario -- pneumonic plague spread person-to-person in a crowded city after introduction by a traveler just back from California, where she came into contact with a plague-infected ground squirrel -- is not implausible. Indeed this is the kind of scenario that bioterrorism planning is designed to detect, respond to and control. The best scene in the movie is the one in which the mayor's assistant -- this is 1991, mind you -- confidently looks in the city's emergency plan for the section on how to deal with epidemics and finds -- nothing. I like the way the movie shows the public health workers as dedicated, taking personal risks (as so many health care workers did to care for people with SARS), and ethical. What is particularly unrealistic is the way the public health workers can just walk into a hospital and start managing patients.

Also, this is the most wooden performance ever by Jerry Orbach in a minor role.