Ford's angry performance boosts the quality of 'Extraordinary Measures'

By Colin Covert

In “Extraordinary Measures,” Harrison Ford is chair-kicking angry. Pig-biting angry. Angrier than a one-man production of “Twelve Angry Men.” He plays Dr. Robert Stonehill, a medical researcher with a potential cure for a fatal genetic disorder and a compulsion to lock horns with anyone he considers his intellectual inferior, which is everyone.

Based on a real-life story, “Extraordinary Measures,” from the new studio CBS Films, would fit snugly into the two-hour slot behind “CSI: NY.” It has the production values, visual texture and maudlin tone of a disease-of-the-week teleplay. Ford’s participation, and the grandstanding performance he delivers, raise it from a middlebrow TV-style weepie to a higher plateau of quality. Intermittently, anyway.

The tear jerking starts early and proceeds until our lachrymal glands are milked, squeezed, sucked and bled dry. Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell play John and Aileen Crowley, whose two youngest children have Pompe Disease, a lethal muscle-waster. John is a star executive, but his kids’ health crisis overshadows career concerns. Plucking responsive chords of work-vs.-family obligations, the script presents John with a dilemma: Should he stay in his job, using its generous health insurance for palliative treatment, or quit to start his own drug company with the brash, quixotic Stonehill and aim for a miracle cure? It wouldn’t be much of a drama if he played it safe, would it?

Ford’s character is a brash, maverick genius contemptuous of fools, and unsentimental about the victims of the disease he’s determined to outwit. Think “House” on trucker pills. Of course, when he meets the Crowleys’ brave little angels, he exposes a well-concealed grumpy/affectionate side. A pickup-drivin’, rock ’n’ roll-blastin’, T-shirt-wearin’ cuss from corn country, he’s an unmanageable force transplanted into a by-the-book corporate culture. Nobody does disdain as well as Ford, and his sneering, glaring, table-pounding turn brings the movie to life. He’s loud, but he doesn’t annoy you; he cheers you up.

When Fraser prods him on the slow pace of progress, Ford roars, “I already work around the clock!” This is one of those lines such as “Go ahead, make my day,” and “You can’t handle the truth” that will go on to have an eternal life of its own.

When the focus shifts to the doughy Fraser and steadfast Russell, the stage is set for tedium. Fraser is a supporting player; in his scenes with Ford, he’s cowed. As the business half of the partnership, he’s tasked with running meetings where stock deals and FDA-approval practices are debated. It’s dull stuff.

The legalistic focus of these scenes does allow one valuable insight, however. To satisfy his investors, Crowley has to offer a calm, calculated financial rationale. It roughens up the movie’s moral texture when the idealist must confront the issue of acceptable patient fatalities — a reminder that sometimes the greater good is served by cold-hearted discipline.

Still, the movie is gushy sentimentality at heart. It begs too hard for our feelings. In a funk of anxiety, Crowley bends important FDA rules to get his kids first crack at the experimental drug. He organizes a tour for Pompe victims to the offices of his new, slow-moving corporate partners to goose their consciences. He does everything but throw a bake sale in the boardroom. Whenever the mush piles up too high, though, Ford pops up, infuriated and bellowing, and we can only cower behind our seats, giggling until the typhoon passes.