Rating: 
Summary: suspenseful and a darn good movie.
Review: Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman at their best. The medical context of this movie is very realistic. Suspenseful. It keeps you on the edge of your seat from the very beginning. A keeper for all video movie collectors
Rating: 
Summary: not all surgery is intended to cure
Review: Michael Palmer's novel owes a lot to Robin Crook's novel Coma which was filmed by Michael Crichton and uses the same hospital setting for scientific experimentation. Director Michael Apted may not have Crichton's touch for paranoid thrillers but clearly producer Elizabeth Hurley saw the property as a change of image vehicle for her then boyfriend Hugh Grant. Although here Grant only partly manages to suppress the self-conscious ticks and stammerings that he used in his cross-over hit Four Weddings and a Funeral, his apologetic body language still fits as a British doctor in an New York public hospital who stumbles across a medical conspiracy (the ole doctors playing God again). The screenplay by Tony Gilroy has Grant repeat phrases like "Let me just get this clear", as if being British gave him some language barrier, and his reaction to an obstructive laboratory attendant is amusing in his understated outrage, culminating in "You're quite a creepy person". For those who find Grant's schtick annoying, this perormance is one to be admired. The film is notable for Sarah Jessica Parker wearing an odd half-brown half-red hairdo (Madonna has a lot to answer for), Gene Hackman playing older than his real age, and the presentation of an underground world of darkness where the homeless and dispossessed live in the bowels of Grand Central Station. Although an art director's delight, one gets the feeling this is not an imaginary location. The mystery at the centre of the film involves the use of those considered to "have nothing" and making them "heroes", but this logic is on a par with the Nazi doctors who used concentration camp inmates for experimental research. And any medical facility which employs security guards who use their guns before their brains can't be good. Apted uses some tired thriller conventions like the foot caught in a railroad track with an oncoming train, the dark figure appearing in the background to see someone searching secret paperwork, and a fistfight in a descending elevator with the numbers lighting up, and Gilroy lingers so long on one plot point that we can easily guess that is a deception. The Danny Elfman score has suggestions of gothic malevolence but Apted misuses it.
Rating:
Summary: An Adept Medical Ethics Drama With A Cerebral Climax
Review: Micheal Apted's Extreme Measures is a snake of a medical drama, writhing around in the dark dank areas of medicine that are independent of scalpels, anastesia, and emergency room proceedures. It's concerned with the hippocratic subconscious, decisions that have less to do with making the proper incisions and zapping the heart back into rhythm and more to do with the god-like freedom that can come from medical knowledge. Hackman is superb in a role that never vears into pure villainy, but hovers upon the thin line between moral justifications and immoral personal detachment. Grant is surprisingly effective and shows wonderful range in shedding his usual spasms of nervousness. The last 15 minutes is intellectual chewing gum for us all to masticate upon.
Rating:
Summary: To the Extreme
Review: Snatched from what would appear to be the latest Crichton novel, Gramercy Hospital's ER is baffled by the strange appearance and subsequent death of a bald escapee from another big apple medical center. Guy (Grant), a harried MD, doesn't need this action. He just wants to do his time and bolt to his promised research post at NYU. You had to know it wouldn't be that easy. The doc turned amateur detective accordingly stumbles upon a series of mysteries that in this case history includes missing records, suspicious hospital administrators, and serious lapses of movie logic. Findings: Something's rotten in the state of healthcare. Well, duh! Human guinea pigs are getting greased and all Guy can come up with is the word triphase. In too deep and getting little help from nurse Jodie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Guy crashes and burns. Evil operatives plant drugs in his apartment, the career goes kaput, and Guy takes a ride into the underbelly of New York (including a harrowing subway scene that ends with a big-bam-boom surprise). All the while he's all but blind to the sinister, morally bankrupt ideals of Dr. Myrick (Gene Hackman). This dweeb's God complex makes Dr. Frankenstein look like the nutty professor. Grant is low-key and likeable. Sure it's slick, but the suspense is real, which makes Extreme Measures a consuming score for Hurley, Grant, and director Michael Apted.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining plot sets Hugh Grant in fine serious drama role
Review: We loved the book by Michael Palmer, on which this movie is "officially" based - but except for experimentation on unknowing human subjects, the two stories bear little more similarity than Palmer's name as "author". Nonetheless, Hugh Grant as Dr. Guy Luthran does a quite competent job in a serious part that's a departure from his normal romantic comedies. Gene Hackman also stars as the "evil" doctor who it turns out is doing illegal surgeries on homeless subjects who get "selected" by special ID work at the hospital where our hero works. A missing victim soon sends Luthran on a scary search for homeless people deep in the city's subway bowels, where David Morse ("Hack", et al) is stalking him for some unknown "FBI" reasons. Sara Jessica Parker serves as a supporting mild love interest but shows up later as part of the insidious plot. Some ethical issues near the end of the film raise some interesting points to ponder, and leave us guessing 'til the end which way things might go. A decent plot, good acting, and sustained suspense, with some credible acting by all the name actors, add up to an entertaining movie. The DVD itself has no extra features and comes in a cheap cardboard "keepbox", with only Dolby Surround Sound, not 5.1 Digital. Aside from these quibbles, an enjoyable hour-and-a-half awaits!
|
