Pairing Brendan Fraser of “Mummy” movie fame with Harrison Ford, the iconic actor behind Indiana Jones and Han Solo, might seem like a brilliant stroke of casting that would result in one of the greatest action movies ever. But in the new film “Extraordinary Measures,” they team up for a medical drama that is so lacking in excitement it would be generous to even describe it as ordinary.
“Measures” follows the true story of John Crowley, a pharmaceuticals executive who has three children – one who is healthy but two suffering from the rare and fatal affliction called Pompe Disease, a very rare genetic disorder which causes a deficiency in the enzyme that breaks down glycogen, causing muscle weakness throughout the body while enlarging the heart and other vital organs.
The average lifespan of a person with Pompe is just nine years, a fact that drives Crowley to an obsessive quest for the cure since his afflicted children are 6 and 8 years old. The best doctor in the country devoted to finding a cure is Robert Stonehill (Ford), a research scientist at the University of Nebraska who’s constantly hampered by a severe lack of funding and a bad attitude.
When Crowley travels from his home in Portland, Oregon to Nebraska to force a meeting with Stonehill, he is so desperate that he creates a Pompe-fighting foundation out of thin air and promises the researcher the $500,000 he needs to bring a prospective cure to medical trials. Forging an agreement, the film then follows the pair’s constant dancing on the financial and medical precipice as they face one challenge after another to raise the funds and beat the clock on Crowley’s childrens’ lives.
This may sound intriguing enough, but unfortunately the well-intentioned “Measures” maintains the same bland tone throughout. The utterly average script by Robert Nelson Jacobs (“Chocolat”) and largely uninspired direction by Tom Vaughn (“What Happens in Vegas”) makes the proceedings feel like a disease-of-the-week TV movie, a staple of television schedules that mercifully faded away in the 1990s. What’s ironic about that is the fact that the film is being released as the debut feature from the new company CBS Films, an offshoot of the CBS television network that ran the majority of those films, rounding out Sunday nights after “Murder She Wrote” with two hours of sentimental searching by doctors.
It’s simply too difficult to make the research against an obscure disease work as compelling cinema, and the film errs further with its very limited locations and numerous fade outs from daytime to night and back again as they work around the clock. That’s a shame, because Ford brings a fun feistiness to the screen as the eccentric curmudgeon Stonehill, who drives his fellow scientists nuts by blasting classic rock through the laboratories at all hours of the night.
Fraser gets an all-too-rare chance to show his own strong dramatic chops, effectively conveying the sadness and desperation of a father whose children are slipping away before his eyes while also having to put on a bravely smiling front for them. Here’s hoping that he’ll get another vehicle in which his gifts can be put to more challenging use than running from an army of zombie skeletons and the corpses of ancient Egyptian kings.
Aside from another winning performance by Keri Russell (whose performance in 2008’s “Waitress” was one of the past decade’s most vibrant) as Crowley’s wife, the rest of the cast’s performances run the gamut from wooden to schmaltzy. Its adorable child actors and solid moral and ethical values (the film thankfully doesn’t jam in a plea for universal health care, nor any cry out for stem cell or other controversial research) may provide a passable day at the movies for families, but anyone else – and even those families – may need life support to prevent them from dying from boredom.
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