Perhaps there are a few moviegoers who've been anxiously anticipating their chance to watch Michael Keaton break his own thumb and operate on his own wounded leg. Maybe these are the same unfortunate few who've dreamed of the day they'll see Andy Garcia plow through an emergency room on a motorcycle and get shot through the armpit. Well, folks, your ship has come in: All this and much, much more await you in "Desperate Measures," an astoundingly inept thriller that's easily the worst movie ever directed by Barbet Schroeder ("Reversal of Fortune") and may well prove to be an all-time low for everyone else involved with it.
David Klass' screenplay is set in San Francisco, although for all the sense it makes Wonderland might have been a more credible locale. Garcia, who has now played a cop as often as Teri Garr has played a dizzy housewife, is cast as Frank Connor, a lawman obsessed with finding a compatible donor whose bone marrow could save his dying son Matt (Joseph Cross). Jailbird Peter McCabe (Keaton) seems to be the only one in the world whose marrow matches, so Connor pulls strings and springs McCabe for a day on the operating table.
But somehow everyone completely forgot that not only is McCabe a psychotic, he's also an evil genius who earned his doctorate while in prison. Who knew?! McCabe escapes, torches a few nurses, shoots some cops and miraculously manages to hack into the hospital's computer system with only a couple of keystrokes. But McCabe's not smart enough to bandage a bleeding leg, which leaves a trail for his pursuers to follow, or to realize that if you want to go unnoticed in a medical facility smoking in the hallway is not the best idea.
While Matt's life hangs by a thread, Connor hunts down McCabe (who must be brought back alive in order for theoperation to proceed), and "Desperate Measures" blossoms into awe-inspiring absurdity, with random explosions, ridiculous car chases down the least congested freeways California has ever seen, and a few bizarre comic inserts from McCabe that are almost as funny as, well, a bone marrow transplant. After about 100 minutes, Schroeder simply stops the madness without bothering to give it any sort of proper ending, perhaps figuring few viewers would bother sticking around for the finale anyhow.
"Desperate Measures" also deserves special condemnation as one of the ugliest-looking films in years. The entire picture is drenched in washed-out blues and greys, as if Tri-Star didn't bother paying the lab bill to have the visuals color-corrected. Certainly that would have been the easiest part of this fiasco to fix: The rest of it is far beyond repair. James Sanford
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