Extreme Measures (1996)
A film review by Michael Redman
Copyright 1996 Michael Redman
** (out of ****)
Hugh Grant desperately wants the movie-going audience to think his first name is "Cary". First we get the stumbling romantic-comedy leading man from his past several films. Now we have the Hitchcockian thriller detective. And he's really not too bad at either of them.
It's unfortunate that the rest of the film doesn't keep pace.
Grant is Guy Luthan, a surgeon in a busy New York hospital on the career fast track. Everything is going along fine until an emergency room patient with out of control symptoms and an undiagnosable disease dies. His curiosity aroused, Luthan attempts to follow up, but finds records lost, a mystery hospital ID bracelet and a vanished body. Something's rotten in the state of medical care.
As he delves further into the mystery, Luthan's life is destroyed. The cops plant drugs in his apartment and he is jailed. He loses his prestigious position and his friends turn against him. Then it gets even worse.
The question at the root of the film=92s moral dilemma is given away in the previews: "If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn't you have to do it?" It turns out that Dr. Lawrence Myrick (Gene Hackman) is conducting research on humans in order to further medical research. =
He's not killing just one person and he's not curing cancer, but you=92re=
supposed to consider the ethical costs of medical research. There's not really much to ponder in this situaation. Despite Hackman's impassioned speech, he's one of the bad guys.
The movie meanders around, never settling on one direction. For a while it's a medical mystery, a thriller, a psychological horror film, and even drifts off into almost a fantasy movie as Luthan is lead to an underground civilization of "moles". While there are effective episodes of each genre (the beginning scenes of two naked men clothed only in strips of plastic running through the streets of New York are particularly horrific), the different sections don=92t hold together.
Hackman's appearances are brief and not up to his usual skills. Sarah Jessica Parker, in a stretch from her usual babe role, is cast against type as Luthan=92s only friend. A courageous decision on her part, it is not one that works. The rest of the characters are only here to further the story, not to be people.
This first offering from Grant and girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley's production company leaves a lot to be desired, but perhaps it serves its function. When compared to such mediocre filmmaking around him, Grant looks all the better.
[This review appeared in "The Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana, 10/10/96. Michael Redman can be reached at mredman@bvoice.com]
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