Despite a decent cast and a powerful story, Extraordinary Measures plays with the soothing blandness of an Oxygen movie-of-the-week. Almost completely -- even strangely -- forgettable, it is without risk and seemingly indifferent to its own rewards: even the uplift that is its due and raison d'être can't muster the effort to get off the ground. "Inspired by true events," the film tells the story of a Portland, Oregon family stricken twice with something called Pompe disease, an affliction connected with Multiple Sclerosis which only affects small children, cutting their life expectancy down to nine years.
Two of John (Brendan Fraser) and Aileen Crowley's (Keri Russell) children suffer from Pompe (pronounced "pomp-ay") and the film begins with their eldest daughter Megan's (Meredith Droeger) eighth birthday party and subsequent medical crisis. Given almost no chance of surviving ("Maybe you can see this as a blessing," a typically tactless doctor tells the stricken Crowleys, "Her suffering will be over"), director Tom Vaughan (_What Happens in Vegas_) uses the episode as a sort of passive-aggressive hedge against an audience he will go on to bore and patronize at length: How can you have anything against a family -- and a film -- with so much heart?
For Megan doesn't die, Vaughan just makes it look like she did. Still in shock from the close call, John abruptly leaves his job as a marketing executive at Bristol-Meyers Squibb to fly to Lincoln, Nebraska, where a scientist named Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford) is working on a theory that has been cited in all of the Pompe literature John has gathered. We are meant to deduce that Stonehill (a character who has apparently invented and is meant to stand in for several of the scientists Crowley dealt with) is of the zany, iconoclastic variety of scientist because he listens to class rock really loud, doesn't seem to be socialized and can't seem to manage the common telephone. Over beers at a Lincoln tavern, Stonehill is unmoved by Crowley's personal plight; under-funded and under-recognized, he simply wants the money -- half a million dollars -- that he would need to prove his theory about the treatment of Pompe.
Crowley vows to raise the money, a promise his lovely, sweet-natured wife (and Keri Russell is fast becoming synonymous with that description) accepts with little more than a furrow of her pretty brow. After raising a hundred grand (an amazing feat that seems to happen overnight) the Crowleys have Dr. Stonehill's attention, but he has a bigger plan: raise ten million in venture capital to start their own biotech company. With John's business acumen and Stonehill's can't-fail theory, the two get tangled up in the business of creating and selling a cure to Big Pharma. They also get to have lots of throaty, shouty arguments that fail to bring the viewer closer to either one of them or their cause: Fraser's Crowley seems both noble and supremely entitled, and the actor, looking uncomfortably doughy, projects a kind of damp unreliability instead of the drive and desperation he was going for. Ford, who handpicked and developed this project (and juiced up a role for himself) is marginally more interesting just doing the Harrison Ford do -- crabbing, sociopathing, then showing unexpected tenderness.
Crowley has a tendency to let his emotional attachment to the pursuit of a new drug drive him to extremes that actually work against his interests, while Stonehill the rationalist seems unable to connect his beloved theories to the people they might actually help. The tendentious bond between them has moments of grace, as when Stonehill learns to humble himself in meetings to smooth over the suits, and Crowley manages to talk fluent, mendacious turkey about marketing, money, and "acceptable loss," knowing his children's lives are on the line. The film is surprisingly effective in telegraphing the complicated science behind treating Pompe and the intricate protocols of clinical trials; the politics of academic and corporate scientific research become far more interesting than the Crowley family itself.
Vaughan goes hanky-grubbing almost every time the kids are on screen; deteriorating rapidly, several sequences linger on both brother and sister losing the ability to use their right hands for some innocent, childish bit of fun. Megan is offered as the sassy "fighter"; she patrols the house in her automatic wheelchair and demands that the drug her father is working on be pink. What I actually felt when watching the Crowley kids was on guard: even knowing it is true story, it almost feels like dirty pool to make visually suffering children a plot component; they tend to freeze the viewer -- and the narrative -- with a complicated dread. The attempt at giving Megan a "personality" aside, they are used as means-to-an-end props more than anything, a strategy echoed when Crowley arranges an impromptu in-house meeting to confront his staff with two dozen Pompe kids and their parents. It was a crude attempt to make the scientists feel something and motivate them in their task. I guess it worked in the real world, and I'm glad.