UK Release Date: 26-02-2010
Starring: Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser
UK Certificate: 18
Director: Tom Vaughan
Country: US

It still seems a little early for screen icon Harrison Ford to relegate himself to the kind of disease-of-the-week output that has always stood (with the likes of Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder) as a type of American dole for declining movie stars. With that preconception in mind, many will be drawn, as I was, to see what the craggy but still very potent actor is doing in this territory, and assuming that it must be something a little better than the benchmark.

Sadly, Extraordinary Measures falls exactly at the midway rating for the genre, and is outstanding only in that Ford joins fellow Hollywood heavyweight Brendan Fraser in this hamstrung attempt to compete with the like of Lorenzo's Oil.

Corporate drug-PR guy John Crowley (Fraser) makes the choice to walk away from his increasingly brilliant career to seek out the help of researcher Dr Robert Stonehill (Ford) in seeking a cure for his two children. The children are suffering from Pompe disease, with varying but almost equally short life expectancies. Stonehill may have the answer, but he doesn't have the money to fund R&D and clinical trials for any drug based on his theories. In any case, he's as crotchety as a bear with a shankful of splinters, and just wants to be left alone to tinker with his ideas while he drowns the outside world out with rock music.

But with the clock ticking on his family and all the well-meaning people around him telling him that he should just enjoy his kids while they're still around, Crowley isn't taking no for an answer. Pretty soon the grumpy doctor is being dragged, partly against his will, into an alliance to found a new bio-tech company to fund a cure or alleviative drug for Pompe disease. It's an uneasy alliance, but at least he still has his rock music and someone to press the flesh who's better at it than he is.

Soon, however, it seems that the only way the drug is going to get created is by the involvement of bigger corporate fish, the pressure of which pits the desperate father and misanthropic scientist against each other...

Extraordinary Measures is based on a true story, and as such any criticism of the plot or subject matter is precluded; the quest to cure the children and the sufferers of Pompe all over the world is worthy and has enough setbacks and mishaps to constitute a story worth telling, within the context of 'this type of movie'.

The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs (whose work shone in The Water Horse and Chocolat, and who here is adapting articles and a book by Geeta Anand) is only workmanlike, and this seems to set the tone for the whole film: this is a by-the-numbers 'save my children' entry without a single hard edge. The performances, music, writing, direction and atmosphere are so completely Disney-fied and sanitised that you rarely feel at all threatened by impending events in the plot. Throwing away the element of suspense in this fashion does leave some room to wring a little dry humour out of the clashes between Fraser and Ford, but these opportunities are thrown away. The film only has one anaemic chortle in it; but then, without the suspense, there's not much steam that needs venting anyway.

Ford and Fraser acquit themselves perfectly well. Playing 'crotchety' is no departure for Ford, and one cannot criticise Fraser for being so soft-edged, since this is an actor who gets hired (at least in this type of movie) for his affability and likeability.
 
Supporting roles are provided by a reliable cast including Keri Russell and Jared Harris, but no greater demands are made on them by the formulaic script and Tom Vaughan's lacklustre direction than in the case of the two main stars.

If you like 'disease-of-the-week' movies, you'll like this, even if you will have seen far better examples. The characters are sympathetically played and their plight is worthwhile. It certainly won't offend you, and indeed has gone out of its way not to. But there is absolutely no reason to see this on the big screen. It's at best a 'B'-feature in a clutch of DVD rentals sometime this summer.