Extraordinary Measures - Quite Ordinary  
| How far have you fallen Harrison Ford? Is this really the best you can do? You find a pedantic, predictable script, you are cast against type in a roll that just doesn't fit and you surround yourself with uninspired actors like Brendan Fraser and Kerry Russell who act through the movie like it's a Hallmark commercial. They are right actually, Extraordinary Measures is a Hallmark commercial drawn out to a full length movie.
Almost as manipulative and phony as The Blind Side, Extraordinary Measures is one of those silly exercises in making audiences feel good about being measurably ordinary. What I mean when I say that is that the film offers nothing original, doesn't challenge the way we look at the world, and just tells a safe and predictable story. It pulls on heart strings that are really just common assumptions instead of something truthful. For example, kids are dying. This is tragic to anyone. Therefore the kids don't need to be real characters and their situation doesn't have to be complex. It just has to be and this is lazy and uninspired. And the audience is supposed to feel good about having emoted some false sort of emotion over the story of this family as if we had really been touched by something. It's all a lie... "inspired by true events."
Extraordinary Measures is anything but extraordinary. It is shallow, trivializing and boring. Maybe they should be finding a cure for insomnia... cause here it is. This is the sort of film that has an "inspirational" speech at the end. Fraser's delivery is so lame that all it inspires is drowsiness.
And Harrison Ford doesn't even appear to be trying to act in this film. His character is supposed to be eccentric. Nothing in the script or his performance demonstrates this. He likes to play classic rock in the lab. Reall? That's as good as you've got? He has a temper? I don't know where these geniuses think this original stuff up!
There is a scene in the middle, with an extra playing the father of a sick child. This is as close as the film gets to real. It last only moments but this actor is far more convincing than Ford, Fraser or Russell. I wish the movie had been about him. Maybe I would have believed it.
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