SPOILERS. It's an old joke. What's the difference between God and a doctor? God doesn't think he's a doctor.
That's Dr. Gene Hackman's problem in this film -- he gets the two identities mixed up. He loses what sociologists call "role distance." He begins to believe that because he can delay death, he can give life, and give the kind of life he'd like to give. Well, we won't get into that here. Please take my course in Philosophy of Medicine 101. You'll find the fee surprisingly affordable. Hurry, offer ends at midnight.
Actually, "Extreme Measures" illustrates just about everything that can go wrong with what might have been a decent medical thriller. The story itself is pretty plain. Promising young doc roots out unethical shenanigans at higher levels, rather as in Robin Cook's "Coma." In "Coma" they just did it for the money. Here they do it because they want to practice what Hackman, Chief of the Shenanigans Department, calls "great medicine." It involves harvesting homeless men, cutting their spinal cords, and more or less encouraging the fusion of the severed nerves. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. When young Dr. Hugh Grant begins to suspect something is up and noses around, he is framed for cocaine possession, employee theft, and having a funny hair style. Ruined, he continues his investigation anyway and it ends in violence.
Michael Palmer, a doc himself, wrote the novel on which this is based. I haven't read it, but Palmer must be aware of just how closely the methods used by Gene Hackman resemble those of the docs who worked under Hitler. Germany was exterminating people who were identified as medically unfit -- for the most humanitarian of reasons, of course. State-sponsored propaganda films showed movies justifying the pruning of the herd. Well, just look at these poor schizophrenic dudes, a kindly doc explains. Aren't they better off dead? Later, Jews were used in experiments to determine how long a human body could survive in near-freezing water, presumably to save the lives of sailors who lost their ships in the Baltic. Next to them, Hackman's doc seems only a trifle misguided.
Did Palmer have anything to say about this script or did he just get paid and run? The film goes in for the cheapest kind of shock effects while the plot meanders around. I mean "cheap," as in hands reaching in from out of the frame and grabbing the hero by the shoulder. Unimaginative too. When Hugh Grant gets his nose bashed in, he suffers from nothing more than a colorful trickle from one nostril to his lip. Didn't the writers ever see a fist fight in a schoolyard? Punched in the nose, the victim bleeds like Niagara and when he tries to wipe it off he smears it all over his lower face. (Cf., Ben Johnson in "Shane" for how it ought to be done.) At one point, Grant is told that he has a break in the 8th vertebra. Later, he sobs to his girl friend that he has a fracture in C6 (sixth cervical) when it should be T1 (first thoracic). Or is that wrong? I was never good at numbers.
Way deep down underground in New York City live "the mole people," from whom Hackman gets his experimental subjects. They're so terrifying that even the normal homeless people who live above ground are afraid to go down there. But Grant does and he finds an angry and suspicious community that looks made up of extras who have been told to dress down. Raggedy clothes, yes, and maybe greasy hair and odd faces, but not TOO extraordinary. Most are freshly shaved, and they speak like high school graduates making a public speech -- being sure to add the "g" at the end of a word like "going". This is directorial sloppiness. Most of the homeless are mentally ill, uneducated, and without material or social resources, bankrupt in every sense. They could not organize a cohesive group. They couldn't organize a trip to a hot dog stand.
It's a minor shame in a way, because there may be a decent thriller lurking in this plot somewhere. Alas, nobody found it, presumably because nobody was looking for it. Everyone involved seems to have taken the easy way out and settled for cash.
That's Dr. Gene Hackman's problem in this film -- he gets the two identities mixed up. He loses what sociologists call "role distance." He begins to believe that because he can delay death, he can give life, and give the kind of life he'd like to give. Well, we won't get into that here. Please take my course in Philosophy of Medicine 101. You'll find the fee surprisingly affordable. Hurry, offer ends at midnight.
Actually, "Extreme Measures" illustrates just about everything that can go wrong with what might have been a decent medical thriller. The story itself is pretty plain. Promising young doc roots out unethical shenanigans at higher levels, rather as in Robin Cook's "Coma." In "Coma" they just did it for the money. Here they do it because they want to practice what Hackman, Chief of the Shenanigans Department, calls "great medicine." It involves harvesting homeless men, cutting their spinal cords, and more or less encouraging the fusion of the severed nerves. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. When young Dr. Hugh Grant begins to suspect something is up and noses around, he is framed for cocaine possession, employee theft, and having a funny hair style. Ruined, he continues his investigation anyway and it ends in violence.
Michael Palmer, a doc himself, wrote the novel on which this is based. I haven't read it, but Palmer must be aware of just how closely the methods used by Gene Hackman resemble those of the docs who worked under Hitler. Germany was exterminating people who were identified as medically unfit -- for the most humanitarian of reasons, of course. State-sponsored propaganda films showed movies justifying the pruning of the herd. Well, just look at these poor schizophrenic dudes, a kindly doc explains. Aren't they better off dead? Later, Jews were used in experiments to determine how long a human body could survive in near-freezing water, presumably to save the lives of sailors who lost their ships in the Baltic. Next to them, Hackman's doc seems only a trifle misguided.
Did Palmer have anything to say about this script or did he just get paid and run? The film goes in for the cheapest kind of shock effects while the plot meanders around. I mean "cheap," as in hands reaching in from out of the frame and grabbing the hero by the shoulder. Unimaginative too. When Hugh Grant gets his nose bashed in, he suffers from nothing more than a colorful trickle from one nostril to his lip. Didn't the writers ever see a fist fight in a schoolyard? Punched in the nose, the victim bleeds like Niagara and when he tries to wipe it off he smears it all over his lower face. (Cf., Ben Johnson in "Shane" for how it ought to be done.) At one point, Grant is told that he has a break in the 8th vertebra. Later, he sobs to his girl friend that he has a fracture in C6 (sixth cervical) when it should be T1 (first thoracic). Or is that wrong? I was never good at numbers.
Way deep down underground in New York City live "the mole people," from whom Hackman gets his experimental subjects. They're so terrifying that even the normal homeless people who live above ground are afraid to go down there. But Grant does and he finds an angry and suspicious community that looks made up of extras who have been told to dress down. Raggedy clothes, yes, and maybe greasy hair and odd faces, but not TOO extraordinary. Most are freshly shaved, and they speak like high school graduates making a public speech -- being sure to add the "g" at the end of a word like "going". This is directorial sloppiness. Most of the homeless are mentally ill, uneducated, and without material or social resources, bankrupt in every sense. They could not organize a cohesive group. They couldn't organize a trip to a hot dog stand.
It's a minor shame in a way, because there may be a decent thriller lurking in this plot somewhere. Alas, nobody found it, presumably because nobody was looking for it. Everyone involved seems to have taken the easy way out and settled for cash.