A Ford wreck.By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
Now I remember why I didn't care for Lorenzo's Oil?too much sentiment over kids with diseases. Similarly, Extraordinary Measures, a typical medical melodrama about a weepy dad, John Crowley (Brendan Fraser), and a crusty scientist, Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), who jointly attempt to beat the odds of the deadly muscle killer, Pompe's disease.
Perhaps I just yearn to learn more about the science of the battle and endure less of the strings and piano extracting tears as the family and kids forcefully enjoy each other in the face of death in a year or so for two of Crowley's children.
As executive producer, Ford can well go over the top with his stereotypically mad scientist anger and cynicism without director Tom Vaughan telling him to tone it down. However it would have been a better movie had Vaughan done so; hey, Ford's Dr. Stonehill is a composite of the medical people who worked on a drug that would at least arrest the disease's development. Why couldn't writer Robert Nelson Jacobs just create a more reasonable curmudgeon? Maybe Ford wanted it that way. Such is the power of a bankable star and a formula that lives any time a kid's disease can "inspire."
The saving factor of Extraordinary Measures is its touching on the modern "information flow" idea about teams not competing with each other but rather sharing knowledge world wide in a scenario where everyone wins. The competition is within the company as Dr. Stonehill stonewalls his discoveries and the company he works for promotes team competition on the same research. As China works out the Google conundrum, NYT's Tom Friedman has speculated that the Communist Party must allow this flow, symbolized by the wide net of Google's search engine, for the old regime to survive.
Who'd have thought such as mediocre film as this could be an allegory about global politics?
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com