'Extraordinary Measures' plays it safe

'Extraordinary Measures" wants to be inspirational. Mostly it makes one think of better movies.

Executive-produced by star Harrison Ford and loosely based on a real-life story, "Measures" is competent enough. However, it's not the least bit inspired.

And it feels as if it has been carefully assembled not to reveal some truth so much as to push certain dramatic buttons for its audience.

The story is inspired by John Crowley (played by Brendan Fraser), a drug company executive whose family is haunted by a genetic tragedy. Crowley's two youngest children suffer from Pompe disease, a multiple-sclerosis-like condition in which the victims waste away for lack of an essential enzyme, invariably dying by age 9.

To save his children, the real-life Crowley quit his job (with its health insurance) and, after attracting money from venture capitalists, established a firm to do fast-track research on Pompe. Its work was so promising that it was subsequently bought up by a huge drug company, which continued the research.

Crowley's quest was documented in the book "The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million -- and Bucked the Medical Establishment -- in a Quest to Save His Children." But a movie needs something more than guys in white lab coats stirring beakers and money men pitching numbers across a conference room table.

So screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs ("Chocolat," "The Shipping News") gives us a fictional character: Robert Stonehill, a cantankerous university scientist who works in obscurity and alienates just about everyone, but who has come closest to solving the Pompe puzzle.

As played by Ford, Stonehill is a brilliant curmudgeon in cowboy boots who despises the regimented culture of big drug companies (not to mention the FDA's convoluted testing procedures), is indifferent to the needs of others (he plays deafening rock music in his lab) and is stubbornly insistent that things be done his way.

No sooner does the hard-scrambling Crowley put together an agreement to further finance their quest for a cure than Stonehill, chafing under the money men's restrictions, tries to blow the deal with his bombastic stunts.

Keeping all this on track is the knowledge that the clock is ticking and that Crowley faces a parent's worst nightmare if their effort fails.

Director Tom Vaughan, whose only other feature credit is the lamentable Cameron Diaz/Ashton Kutcher comedy "What Happens in Vegas," delivers an impersonal movie that quickly settles into predictability. Every 10 minutes or so a new obstacle is thrown in Crowley's path, whether it be a shortage of funds or corporate maneuvering. Can he finesse the problem and keep the research going?

The whole affair has the atmosphere of a disease-of-the-week drama. Fraser spends most of the movie looking moist-eyed and desperate; the ever-charismatic Ford never convinces us that Stonehill is anything more than a dramatic convenience built of too-familiar tropes. As Crowley's wife, Keri Russell is mostly window dressing.