FILM REVIEW: EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES

Tribune Newspapers Critic

2 stars

From screenwriter to leading actors to customers out on a Friday night at the multiplex, nobody commits lightly or cynically to a movie such as Extraordinary Measures. The fact-based drama concerns a Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. marketing executive, John Crowley, whose two youngest children contracted a rare form of muscular dystrophy known as Pompe disease. Racing against time to finance the development of a cure, Crowley's plight became a good-news story of dedication, inspiration and not taking no for an answer.

The movie is being sold as ``The Blind Side'' without the football, or without everything else ``The Blind Side'' is actually about. The one thing these two pictures have in common is their slickly packaged belief in what the well-to-do can do, if they put their money where their heart is.

Any parent (or anyone, really) can place themselves in the Crowley family's position and begin to imagine, at least, what tests of character the situation would require. The inaugural effort from the newly formed CBS Films follows a well-worn series of narrative peaks and valleys. But you can find more provocative medical crises on TV every week of the year, albeit without this film's headliners.

Brendan Fraser plays Crowley, fervent commitment incarnate; Keri Russell, his patient and unflappable wife; and as Crowley's biotech partner and sometime-adversary, Harrison Ford (who also executive-produced) plays the scowling, antisocial researcher who may hold the key to the kids' survival. The Ford character, like so many men of docudrama science before him, is a composite of several real-life people. His key early scene brings together, for the first time, this rugged individualist -- working out of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, from research grant to research grant -- with young Megan Crowley (Meredith Droeger). Here Ford's character, Dr. Stonehill, confronts the human face of all his insular obsessions.

The encounter tugs at the heart, but in a way that feels engineered to do so by the screenwriter, Robert Nelson Jacobs. The technique behind every frame of ``Extraordinary Measures,'' from the direction of Tom Vaughan (``What Happens in Vegas'') to Andrea Guerra's near-fatally goopy musical score, offers rote satisfactions at best.

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved. The Crowley family scenes are well-acted, but they don't feel realistically fraught or complicated, and before we get to know much about how everyone interacts under these dire conditions, bam, we're back to the chronicle of the biotech start-up, the buyout of that company, and the subsequent interdepartmental biopharmaceutical politics. Much of this would prove challenging to any writer.

The big confrontations between Fraser and Ford, with Stonehill raging against the bean counters and Crowley trying to keep his loose cannon from misfiring, feel strangely rote as well. They don't lack feeling; they are, in fact, written and performed at Emmy-highlights-reel pitch. The movie's a tough sell. It plays like a passable two-hour prime-time TV movie. Now: Is that good enough?

MPAA rating: PG (for thematic material, language and a mild suggestive moment).

Running time: 1:46.

Cast: Brendan Fraser (John Crowley); Harrison Ford (Dr. Robert Stonehill); Keri Russell (Aileen Crowley).

Credits: Directed by Tom Vaughan; written by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the book ``The Cure'' by Geeta Anand; produced by Michael Shamberg, Stacy Sher and Carla Santos Shamberg. A CBS Films release.

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