Taglines: Time is running out.
Desperate Measures movie storyline. San Francisco police officer Frank Connor is in a frantic search for a compatible bone marrow donor for his gravely ill son. There’s only one catch: the potential donor is convicted multiple murderer Peter McCabe who sees a trip to the hospital as the perfect opportunity to get what he wants most: freedom. With McCabe’s escape, the entire hospital becomes a battleground and Connor must pursue and, ironically, protect the deadly fugitive who is his son’s only hope for survival.
Desperate Measures is a 1998 American action thriller film starring Michael Keaton, Andy García, Marcia Gay Harden and Brian Cox, directed by Barbet Schroeder. It was filmed in both the San Francisco Bay Area and downtown Pittsburgh with such landmarks as the BNY Mellon Center, the Allegheny County Courthouse[1] and the Oakland Bay Bridge. The film was released on January 30, 1998 and was a critical and financial failure. However, Andy García won an ALMA Award for “Outstanding Actor in a Feature Film in a Crossover Role”.
Film Review for Desperate Measures
Here’s an idea: cancel all movies that would otherwise be released in January. Bag them, write them off, tell everyone involved, “Sorry, but we’re calling a moratorium on stuff that sucks, so why don’t we all just head for a cigar bar and take a load off?” Innovative thinking like that would have prevented the numbing inanity of Desperate Measures (TriStar), a thriller that seems to have been manufactured by a computer program.
A cute kid with leukemia (Joseph Cross) needs a bone-marrow transplant or else he’ll die. After a frantic database search for a compatible donor, the kid’s dad, a cop (Andy Garcia), comes up with only one candidate — an unrepentantly vicious, brilliant convicted murderer (Michael Keaton — and by the way, when did murderers get so regularly brilliant?).
After reluctantly agreeing to participate, the monster is wheeled strapped, bolted, chained, and guarded to the hospital, where, nevertheless and inevitably, he manages to escape. Law-enforcement types don’t care whether the punk dies in the pursuit, of course, but Dad (and Marcia Gay Harden as the boy’s doctor) are in the ticklish moral yet hardheadedly practical position of needing the fugitive alive. Don’t shoot — until my boy is serviced! is the basic idea. And so Dad gives chase, causing plenty of people to be wounded in dramatic dustups along the way, but none to be definitively killed, which, of course, would put a crimp in audience sympathy.
The slippery (and, in case I forgot to mention, ludicrous) ethical underpinnings of Desperate Measures are, you would think, just the ticket for Barbet Schroeder, the director of Reversal of Fortune and Kiss of Death who enjoys playing with material that explores moral ambiguity (or just plain amorality) and demonstrates silky, kinky nastiness between protagonists linked by weird fate. But that Schroeder isn’t present here.
Maybe he’s already at the cigar bar. Keaton broadly leers and sneers, his McDonald’s-arch eyebrows and darting tongue doing all the personality building. Garcia pleads with limpid When a Man Loves a Woman eyes when not screaming at his fellow cops to leave the escaped convict alone. Harden flails around with absolutely nothing to do — a token competent-woman character to whom no one pays attention. And the director does nothing to sharpen the tension, subvert the conventionality, or (in that interestingly, faintly creepy Schroeder way) deepen the aesthetic quality of what is otherwise meant for ER.
There, this film would not even rate as the main story but would most likely be doled out as a subplot to impede the romance of Dr. Ross and Nurse Hathaway. By the time Desperate Measures degenerates into an old-fashioned car chase, you may wish you were watching General Hospital.
vDesperate Measures (1998)
Directed by: Barbet Schroeder
Starring: Michael Keaton, Andy Garcia, Marcia Gay Harden, Brian Cox, Erik King, Efrain Figueroa, Joseph Cross, Tracey Walter, Janel Moloney, Neal Matarazzo
Screenplay by: David Klass
Production Design by: Geoffrey Kirkland
Cinematography by: Luciano Tovoli
Film Editing by: Lee Percy
Costume Design by: Gary Jones
Set Decoration by: Jennifer Williams
Art Direction by: Sandy Getzler
Music by: Trevor Jones
MPAA Rating: R for violence and language.
Distributed by: TriStar Pictures
Release Date: January 30, 1998
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