A medical disaster which could potentially kill millions of people all around the world...well that shouldn't be boring. But in Contagion boring it is. This is a medical thriller which is not at all thrilling. The film is a largely tedious, totally unfocused mess. You have a great cast filled with some of the most renowned performers of our time. You have a highly acclaimed director in Steven Soderbergh. And you have a story which should be absolutely gripping. How could it all go so wrong?

A woman drops dead in Minnesota. Soon people are dropping dead all over the place, felled by a new disease doctors can't figure out. The world goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket. We see doctors investigating the origin of this new virus and trying to find a cure. We see ordinary people trying to survive in a society which is crumbling all around them. And, in a subplot which should have been excised from the film, we see an unscrupulous blogger who professes to have the cure. There are a lot of strands of the plot and these strands don't come together at all satisfactorily. Honestly the whole thing is a mess. And a quite boring mess at that.

With the film being so unfocused it's hard to form attachments to any character. If there's one person we come close to connecting with it's an ordinary man, played by Matt Damon, who just wants to keep his daughter safe. But any time you want to invest in his story the film abandons him and goes off somewhere else. We go to Atlanta where Laurence Fishburne plays the man heading the efforts of the CDC. We go to Hong Kong, where Marion Cotillard's character investigates the origin of the disease and ends up in a surprising situation which does absolutely nothing to advance the plot. We have Kate Winslet playing a doctor investigating things in Minnesota. Her story has a little juice to it but it isn't sustained. And we have Jude Law, playing that incredibly annoying blogger, whose story sends the film completely off the rails. All the while there's a global disaster going on so the film should feel big, have some real weight to it. But it doesn't, it's all very mundane. An easy film to compare Contagion to is Outbreak. In that film, the focus was on an outbreak in one town. Not as big a deal as a worldwide pandemic. Maybe Contagion is too big for its own good. Outbreak was a taut, tight thriller. It had focus. Contagion is all over the place. And the thrill is gone.