Extreme Measures

The prognosis on this medical thriller is not good. Hugh Grant plays a bright young doctor destined for the highest echelons of New York medical circles when he comes up against a baffling emergency-room case that he can't put to rest. The more questions he asks, the more perplexing the case becomes. He presses on until it begins to ruin his career and he reaches a point where he has nothing left to lose by probing for the truth. Extreme Measures begins realistically enough but quickly loses plausibility. Of course, there has to be a mad doctor out there playing god and it doesn't take much diagnosing skill to figure out who it is and why so many unrelated people are willing to abet the doctor's arrogant scheme. What director Apted (Thunderheart, Gorillas in the Mist, Coal Miner's Daughter) is undoubtedly interested in here is the story's up-to-the-minute questions of medical ethics. But any sincere investigation of the situation's ethical dilemmas is hampered by a plot run amok with transparently nefarious evildoers and ever-more ludicrous complications, until it sputters to a conclusion and a thoroughly preposterous epilogue in which all animosities are neatly put to rest. Somebody call a doctor.