Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Less than a month ago, I named the ensemble drama CROSSING OVER as the single worst movie I saw in 2009. The overwrought film that dealt with the many aspects of immigration literally buried itself with do-gooder intention, terrible writing, and largely phoned-in performances, including what I would consider the single laziest and least-inspired work I've ever seen from Harrison Ford. But Ford's latest work, EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES, might be just a tiny bit worse, but not because Ford isn't trying. If anything, he's trying waaaaay too hard, as is the movie-of-the-week screenplay that lays the groundwork for one of the most overly sentimental films I've seen outside the Lifetime network in a very long time.
The film is actually the real-life story of John Crowley (Brendan Fraser, looking puffier than ever) and his wife Aileen (Keri Russell), who find out that two of their three children have a rare genetic disorder known as Pompe disease, which attacks the musculature and inevitably results in death before a child reaches the age of 10. In doing copious research on the disease, which has so few victims that very little research has been done and no pharmaceutical companies have bothered trying to find a medicinal treatment, Crowley keeps coming across the name of a University of Nebraska professor, Dr. Robert Stonehill (Ford), whose research is fairly theoretical up to this point but doesn't have the funding to see his ideas through.
Crowley flies to Nebraska where he meets the rough, ragged, and short-tempered Stonehill, a man who is used to being a one-man show and not having to play with others in his lab; he doesn't even see patients, nor does he want to. But when Crowley promises to raise the necessary funds to cover the research costs, Stonehill agrees to partner with the ambitious and desperate man. Despite this being a true story, the character of Dr. Stonehill is a composite. If you didn't know that going in, the fact that Ford has chosen to play him as this ill-mannered curmudgeon might not bother you as much. But even if I hadn't known Stonehill was fictional, he feels 100 percent manufactured for this movie. It's apparently not enough that he is attempting to create a drug that stops the progression of this fatal illness; he must also have his hard heart melted by the love the Crowley parents have for their children. The sick-kid manipulation is in full effect in EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES.
Now I'll admit, the ways director Tom Vaughan (WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS) and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs (THE WATER HORSE), working from the Geeta Anand book "The Cure," come up with to make the very internal process of research a little more palatable for a visual medium get the job done. And when the film sticks to the science and the ways in which Crowley and Stonehill worked around the medical establishment to find this cure, EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES feels like it might have a shot at telling a compelling, lean story. Instead what we get are excuses to watch Ford yell and scream and throw things (I don't remember if he actually throws things, but in my head, I feel like he did). Ultimately, Ford's antics overshadow any good that might have come out of this movie.
Things only get worse (for the audience, not the Crowleys) when Stonehill's research progresses to the point where they can take their findings to a pharmaceutical company, which wants to add Stonehill to one of their teams to come up with an actual medicine. Crowley immediately sees that the way the company is set up to actually have researchers working in competition rather than together as a unit will not result in finding a cure in time to save his children's lives, so he sets out to change he corporate structure (personified by the woefully underwritten Dr. Kent Webber, played by Jared Harris, who does little more than look befuddled and act as a human roadblock).
When you compare a movie like EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES to something like the far superior 1992 work LORENZO'S OIL, in which the parents themselves take a hand in the research that ultimately leads to a cure for their son's rare illness, you immediately see how one can made a beautiful film about living with illness and being inspired to act on behalf of your child when the world around refuses to do so. What we get, instead, is contrivance after frustrating contrivance. I'm certainly not against seeing Harrison Ford give us a taste of his acting chops every so often; I've certainly enjoyed him when he hasn't been in action or sci-fi mode, but with this film, I feel like he's trying to prove something about his abilities. And I don't think I need proof or a reminder that Ford knows how to play a jerk. EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES is an embarrassing exercise in pathos, one that sacrifices any real opportunity for drama by focusing too much on finding the Tin Man a heart and trying to make the audience cry. If it makes the filmmakers feel any better, I cried watching this movie, but it was because I was in excruciating pain.
-- Capone
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