I originally did not plan to see Extraordinary Measures. Ads for the film made it look like a run-of-the-mill "disease-of-the-week" TV movie, and I didn't give it much thought. But after its theatrical release, I found out it concerned a father and businessman, John Crowley (played by Brendan Fraser), teaming up with a scientist, Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), to speed the development of a cure for Pompe disease, an enzyme deficiency condition that kills infants. I suddenly had a personal interest in what the movie was about because, as it happens, my uncle, Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, was a leading researcher for treatment of Pompe Disease during his time at Duke University.

This very fact about my uncle's involvement actually made minor waves on the internet about the "Hollywoodizing" of true stories. The "Dr. Stonehill" of the movie is a fictional character -- a composite of various scientists and researchers that the real John Crowley worked with. Somehow, the word had gotten out that the real scientist who should have gotten credit was Dr. Chen, and, to make things worse, a Chinese man of importance had been changed to Dr. Stonehill, a generically gruff white scientist played by Ford. The man who originally brought this information to attention was Roger Ebert, who in his review of the movie gives credit to my uncle for the development of the Pompe cure (Ebert, bless his heart, even included a nice photo of him). A few other sites, particularly ones about the representation of Asians in the media, picked up on this tidbit to express outrage.

By doing some further digging, I came upon an article I assume was one of Ebert's sources of information concerning the story of the Pompe cure. It's an informative piece spotlighting the work of Dr. Chen and his associates at Duke, and I recommend giving it a look. Digging even further, I discovered that the story of the search for the cure for Pompe disease is a sprawling epic, and to give my uncle main credit would be misleading -- the research was begun in the 1990s by Dutch scientists, Arnold Reuser and Ans van der Ploeg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Dr. Chen's work at Duke ran concurrent to their ongoing work, so effectively there were two fronts fighting against this disease. A biotech company called Genzyme eventually got involved and helped fund the clinical trials in both fronts of the study; using all the information gathered, they engineered a medicine called Myozyme that successfully counteracts the effects of Pompe disease.

Based on Geeta Anand's The Cure, Extraordinary Measures doesn't really care about any of this. It would rather have you believe the research for the treatment of Pompe disease was going nowhere fast until Crowley got desperately involved. Crowley has two children diagnosed with the disease. In the movie, the elder one, Megan (Meredith Droeger), has reached the age of 9 but her condition won't give her more than a year to live. Crowley then seeks out Dr. Stonehill of the University of Nebraska, who has a radical approach to the solution but can't get anywhere because of lousy funding. They team up to start a biotech company dedicated to working off of Stonehill's research; eventually, their work is worthy enough to gain the attention of Zymagen, a large biotech corporation, who buys them out and places Crowley in charge of their Pompe division.

That last part is mostly true, except that Zymagen was really Genzyme. Buying Crowley's company, Novazyme, in order to incorporate their third-party research, they did place Crowley in charge of their Pompe efforts for about a year. Dr. Stonehill's primary analogue would not be Dr. Chen but more likely Dr. William Canfield of the University of Oklahoma, who founded Novazyme and partnered with Crowley.

In any case, the movie's main concern is to show that Pompe research and its path to clinical trials faced speedbump after speedbump, and that Crowley was the driver determined to push through all of them. He nabbed the ignored genius researcher, he brought his work to a giant biotech firm, he made the executives there more patient-aware, and he continually questioned a corporate system that, due to its commercial nature, put on an objective, cold face on the research it did to help real living, sick people. Admittedly, it's easy to root for a loving father fighting through the system, but Extraordinary Measures shamelessly piles on the sentimentality and disregards the real work of the many scientists dedicated to fighting this disease for years.

The movie plays up most of the regular clichés in the screenwriting  playbook, starting with the loving, sad, and determined Crowley and his adorable family. His quest is sincere in the face of all obstacles thrown at him, and there are a lot of them, all designed to make his determination look better in the process, of course. But the most ridiculous cliché involves the character of Dr. Stonehill, who's one of those old guys so beaten by the futility of working at a university that he's become an irascible old crank. What a maverick -- he works with loud rock 'n roll music blaring, and if that annoys the youngsters, that's even better. He righteously takes every setback and criticism personally, and spends half his time yelling. At one point, he shouts, "Get out of my lab!" I'd like to see the standoff that would occur if he stepped on Clint Eastwood's lawn while Eastwood stepped in Ford's lab.

Although Extraordinary Measures milks all the drama it can, I wouldn't call it wholly unsuccessful. It does give attention to a lesser-known deadly disease. And any parent has that spot which gets hit when he or she sees a sick child whose father and mother are willing to do anything in the universe for (really, though, it's not that hard to draw up such a scenario and get instant tearjerking). The movie perhaps provides some insight into how public health research must accomodate a marriage to the corporate biotech world in order to make any kind of progress, but while doing so it glosses over the very real efforts of academics who are doing their best to work within this existing system and succeeding.

The film's major crimes, though, are that it's just corny and mawkish. To play up the efforts of one man (to whom I would wish the best in real life) and his off-the-cuff pluck, the barriers placed in his path are the stuff of screenwriting contrivance and cartoonish coldhearted villainy from skeptical venture capitalists and protocol-pushing execs. There are many people who worked together on the real fight, including Mr. Crowley, including Dr. Chen, including the people at Genzyme and the folks "Dr. Stonehill" is supposed to represent -- so the only real villain needs to be the disease.

(Released by CBS Films and rated "PG" for thematic material, language and a mild suggestive moment.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.