‘Extraordinary Measures’ extraordinarily dull and lifeless
Published 12:53 pm Friday, January 22, 2010
Everybody likes stories of the little guy bucking the odds and outwitting the system, but “Extraordinary Measures” works a new wrinkle on this: It proves that as long as you can conjure up a measly 10 million bucks, you might have a chance at conquering a mysterious disease.
The film is based on a true story, albeit with fictional elements. There real person at its center is John Crowley, played by a chunky Brendan Fraser, who set about finding treatment for an incurable disease that afflicted his own children.
Crowley has two children with Pompe disease, and put his entrepreneurial skills at work to found his own pharmaceutical company in order to push the discovery of a useful treatment.
The film creates a composite character, a cranky doctor played by Harrison Ford, as the scientific counterpart to Crowley’s journey.
The character, named Robert Stonehill, falls along conventional lines (he’s a baby boomer who listens to ’70s album rock while he dreams up his theories) and he has no touch for actual doctoring; his home is the lab.
So we get the contrast between Stonehill’s brusque egomania and Crowley’s dogged Everyman. Unfortunately, this contrast is much less interesting than the filmmakers think.
Similar conflicts are drawn up between Crowley and the corporate types (played by Jared Harris and Patrick Bauchau) who control the purse strings he needs to yank.
The purse ends up holding a lot more than $10 million, which puts the viewer in the somewhat peculiar position of rooting for a large pharmaceutical company. But hey, a cure’s a cure.
The doctor is a character part for a leading man, which might explain why Harrison Ford looks somewhat tentative in the role. Ford is also one of the film’s producers, so playing second fiddle to Brendan Fraser’s concerned dad was presumably his choice.
Keri Russell plays Fraser’s wife, but screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs hasn’t given her much to work with.
Instead, we get some basic personality conflicts, just enough science talk to make it all sound convincingly researched, and a handful of appealing child actors.
In one scene, Crowley brings a group of Pompe-afflicted children to appear before the scientists working on the treatment, a violation of company policy. He wants them to see the human side of the research process.
The film itself is a little like that — a calculated move to gain our sympathy and attention. That might be why it feels less like a living movie than a flat diagram: a series of equations to reach a result, like something drawn up on Dr. Stonehill’s blackboard. The result is as dull as its title.
