‘Extraordinary Measures’ a soapy, TV-like movie

Modern Hollywood’s failed attempts at medical thrillers are too often made to measure. Extreme measures, desperate measures, extraordinary measures. There were hospital perversions via “Extreme Measures,” the disastrous first teaming of Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker (forewarning their recent fiasco “Did You Hear About the Morgans?”). Next, a sociopath was the perfect bone marrow donor via “Desperate Measures,” a terrible contrivance with Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia. Today, we get a manipulative debacle exploiting wheelchair-bound, dying children via “Extraordinary Measures,” another frightful pairing of former A-listers that doesn’t measure up,

Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser star in this soapy TV movie masquerading as an earnest feature film. Ford is more responsible, though, for its failure. He alternates between self-consciously mugging like a constipated codger and yelling at the top of his lungs as the least believable example of a brilliant scientist ever rendered.

And Ford is also this corny project’s executive producer. He and his people were reportedly “inspired by” a true story, from the Geeta Anand book “The Cure,” to develop the race-against-time melodrama. A guy way out of his element, Tom Vaughan (“What Happens in Vegas”), directs from a script by Robert Nelson Jacobs.

They begin with what is a potentially inspiring framework for a story, especially if it is true. A frantic father — who just happens to be a Harvard Business School graduate and already has experience with the pharmaceutical industry — finds the research expert (Ford), starts a biotech firm and tries to manufacture a cure before his two deteriorating children die.

But there’s no way to build suspense. Everybody in the audience already knows: No studio would ever have made a movie about this if these events hadn’t turned out well.

Filmmaker Vaughan makes the proceedings drip with schmaltz. He bludgeons us, for example, with protracted super-extreme close-ups of sad daddy capitalist John Crowley (played by a paunchy Frasier) gazing deeply into the eyes of his weak 8-year-old daughter Megan (Meredith Droeger). Just then, by gosh, Papa is spurred into action.

Keri Russell plays the dutiful mother. She barely flinches when John throws away a lucrative corporate career and their health insurance to scrounge for a treatment for Pompe disease, the form of muscular dystrophy plaguing their family.

But the only thing extraordinary in “Extraordinary Measures” is that real human suffering has been leveraged to give an elderly action star a chance to pretend he’s a character actor.