Just as his career is taking off, John Crowley learns that his two youngest kids have a fatal disease. The movie centers on his efforts to find a researcher who might have a cure for the rare genetic disorder.
Easy to root for a loving father fighting through the system, but Extraordinary Measures shamelessly piles on the sentimentality and disregards the real work of the many scientists dedicated to fighting this disease for years.
It's about as dramatically taut as your garden-variety board meeting. And it makes you realize that jerking a tear or two isn't necessarily a bad thing for a filmmaker to do, if it at least keeps your audience awake.
Extraordinary Measures strives to tug at our heartstrings, and educate us on a little publicized disease, but it ends up feeling like a drug itself - manufactured using artificial chemicals by technicians in a cold lab.
Harrison Ford still retains enough of his old movie star magic to ramp up the electricity a bit when he's onscreen, but this only makes you want to see him do something that makes better use of his gifts. Brendan Fraser just seems to grow bigger over the
