Extraordinary Measures is a saccharine, heartstring-tugging Hallmark card of a movie, an inspirational tale jury-rigged to provide as much cockle-warming as can be uncomfortably wedged into 105 minutes. If watching wheelchair-bound children delivering life lessons to cantankerous scientists while the soundtrack plays Eric Clapton’s “Change the World” is your idea of a pleasant night at the theatre, your dreams have been made material.
The rest of us will find plenty to politely nod through in the second directorial effort from Tom Vaughan, who previously helmed the much-reviled Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz vehicle, What Happens in Vegas. Brendan Fraser stars as a marketer of pharmaceuticals and a father of three. His climb up the corporate ladder from humble New Jersey origins has given him and wife Keri Russell a borderline idyllic existence, except for one thing — two of Fraser’s children suffer from Pompe disease, a fatal disorder that has them confined to wheelchairs for their tragically shortened lives.
Enter Harrison Ford as the eccentric but brilliant scientist (eccentric in this case means he wears jeans and listens to classic rock) who is head-and-shoulders above his fellow researchers in pursuit of a cure for Pompe. Though initially reluctant to leave his low-paying, underfunded University of Nashville lab, Ford eventually joins Fraser in a risky ploy to start their own pharma-corp and make the theoretical cure a reality.
There’s enough personal, professional and entrepreneurial conflict in the material for a legitimately compelling story, but this screenplay (by Robert Nelson Jacobs, from the book by Geeta Anand) isn’t it. Ford and Fraser are both burdened by one-note characters, though those characters admittedly play to the actors’ strengths. Ford is perpetually sour, refusing to play nice with his co-workers and taking every criticism, no matter how valid, as a direct personal assault — it’s a variant of the same character he’s been enjoyably portraying since Han Solo, but with more medical jargon thrown in.
Fraser, on the other hand, transforms himself into a vessel of pure earnestness, emoting love for his family and disgust for the “profit-first, people-second” mentality of big pharma with wide-eyed sincerity. It’s a testament to Fraser’s everyman charm that he’s still recognizably human by the film’s end; as written, the character is practically a Platonic ideal of fatherhood.
The film is the first from CBS’s newly relaunched film division, which is entirely appropriate — aside from the presence of Ford and Fraser, Extraordinary Measures feels like a TV movie. The only thing missing is an impassioned shout of “These are my kids we’re talking about, damn it!” from Fraser. But then, that might be getting a bit too edgy.
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