REVIEW: Emotional film not extraordinary enough for big screen

GRADE: C

EXTRAORDINARY
MEASURES

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Harrison Ford, Keri Russell

Director: Tom Vaughan

Theaters: Hollywood, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark

Rated: PG (for thematic material, language and a mild suggestive moment)

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

“Extraordinary Measures” is a terrific TV movie. Too bad it’s not on TV.

Inspired by the book “The Cure,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Geeta Anand, “Extraordinary Measures” is the true story of the Crowley family and their fight to save the lives of their children, stricken with Pompe, a neuromuscular degenerative disease that enlarges the internal organs of its young victims, generally killing them before their first decade of life.

John Crowley (a paunchy Brendan Fraser) has a lucrative job with a large pharmaceutical company, but leaves it all behind to join forces with Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), a brilliant but thorny research scientist who is convinced he has found a way to stop the disease in its tracks. For John Crowley and his wife, Aileen (Keri Russell), it is an extraordinary risk, but also a very personal one — two of their three children are afflicted with the fatal disease and have only a few years of life left.

Together, Crowley and Stonehill form a biotech company and race against the clock to develop a live-saving cure. Crowley handles the business side while Stonehill helms the research. They battle the medical and business establishment — and each other — in an unlikely alliance that will ultimately decide the fate of not only the Crowley children, but thousands of others stricken with the disease.

“Extraordinary Measures” is the first feature to come out of CBS Films, the new movie arm of the television network giant.
Unfortunately, it plays not like a film worthy of the silver screen, but rather a small-screen interloper, a Lifetime or Hallmark mini-series installment with movie-star faces.

Despite its best intentions, the film never comes off as anything other than a PR piece, an extended PSA for the plight of those suffering from Pompe. It feels too targeted, too specific for its own good. Worse, “Extraordinary Measures” is essentially the same scene repeated over and over again, a monotonous rise and fall in action that dulls the tension and creates a dramatic malaise the film is never able to rise above.

There is no dramatic arc here — just a sustained and flat tension that makes it nearly impossible to feel anguish or elation, both of which are repeatedly called for.

Ford, for his part, is aging extremely well. Out of the fedora and leather jacket of 2008’s “Indiana Jones” installment that came across as admittedly matured, he appears strong and virulent, lacking none of the swagger or charm that made him the headliner of two blockbuster trilogies.

But Ford (who also served as executive producer on the film), is given nothing to do here except bark. His prickly character spends most of the film pointing at the door and yelling for various characters to “Get out!”

If this is not heady enough material for an actor of Ford’s caliber, the piece de resistance comes at the end of the film, in a conclusion that entirely invalidates Stonehill’s presence up to that point. It is the equivalent of being told, at the end of the third film in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, that valiant Frodo did not have to brave Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power in Mount Doom after all, but was, in fact, just in the way all along and could have just as easily stayed home.