‘Extraordinary Measures,' a movie about a medical breakthrough, is not especially eager to break new ground of its own. Directed with care and competence by Tom Vaughan (“What Happens in Vegas”), the film hews closely to familiar themes and patterns. One strand is a drama about a family in crisis, with parents facing the illness and possible death of two of their children, who suffer from a fatal genetic disorder. Another piece is a buddy picture, in which a mismatched pair of guys — one earnest and emotive (Brendan Fraser), the other gruff and solitary (Harrison Ford) — set off on an unlikely adventure, hoping to find a cure. But also, and more unusually, the film, adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from a nonfiction book by the journalist Geeta Anand, is an examination of how medical research is conducted and financed. The storytelling and the visual style are rarely more than workmanlike, and the big scenes arrive punctually and are played with minimal nuance. But the dogged, unflashy presentation of emotionally charged, complicated material works to the film's advantage. The lump-in-the-throat elements take care of themselves but the startling thing about “Extraordinary Measures” is not that it moves you. It's that you feel that you have learned something about the way the world works. Fraser, his eternal boyishness comfortably expanding in a pudgy 40-something frame, plays John Crowley, a midlevel executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb whose two younger children, a son and a daughter, suffer from a rare, inherited form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe's disease. John and his wife, Aileen (Keri Russell), do their best to give Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez), who use wheelchairs and breathing tubes, a normal life, with bowling alley birthday parties and trips to the beach. After the rest of the family has gone to bed, John rifles through scholarly journals and trawls the Internet, searching for some inkling of a cure and wondering how much time Megan and Patrick have left. His inquiries lead him to Robert Stonehill, a University of Nebraska professor played with sublime cantankerousness by Harrison Ford. Motivated by sheer scientific curiosity, and impelled by a stubborn, go-it-alone work ethic, Stonehill thinks he has isolated an enzyme that has the potential to arrest the progress of Pompe's disease, which usually kills its victims at the age of 8 or 9. Crowley impulsively promises to finance Stonehill's experiments and hurriedly sets up a foundation for that purpose. But they soon abandon the nonprofit route and put together a start-up company in the middle of the prairie. The evolution of their business plan, along with the pursuit of the treatment that will save Megan and Patrick, is what holds “Extraordinary Measures” together. The film resists the temptation to turn into a full-blown family melodrama. There are tensions and stresses between John and Aileen, but they also deal with an awful situation in the matter-of-fact, practical way that loving parents often do, and the film is all the more moving because, for the most part, it understates their grief and anxiety. “Extraordinary Measures” is ultimately about how feeling and objectivity can work together, and also about how the protocols of medical research and development can both enable and obstruct progress. “Extraordinary Measures” is rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.
