vincentlynch-moonoi I'm not sure why this film only gets around a "6" rating. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am giving it a "7".First of all, it has a mostly excellent cast. Hugh Grant is excellent as the young doctor who gets caught up in a conspiracy to use homeless people for experimental unneeded surgery. At first I was bothered by how very young Grant looked; it didn't seem a doctor so young could be advancing so quickly in the field of medicine. However, when you actually look at his real age when the movie was made, it did work.Gene Hackman -- an actor I never really wanted to like -- is as good as he almost always was, this time playing the disturbingly reassuring evil doctor.The one real let down here is Sarah Jessica Parker as a physician who is helping Hackman (due to her brother's spinal injury). I simply do not see the attraction to this ridiculously passive actress.David Morse turns in a strong performance as an FBI Agent also aligned with Hackman, as does Bill Nunn as a similarly aligned police detective.As to the story itself, which takes place in New York City (and uses locations scenes to the film's advantage), it's sorta scary when you think about how medical researchers could misuse their public trust if they get too wrapped up in the cures on which they are working. In this case, it's spinal injuries. The suspense is very real -- and StephenKing-ish -- when Grant descends into the bowels of New York City to find the people who live underground. And then there's a dramatic twist when our good guy becomes paralyzed himself...or does he...and if he is paralyzed, how can be the hero at the film's conclusion? Nope, I disagree with the general consensus. I think this is a very good suspense film and quite believable...at least as much as almost any film.

adi_2002 Two mans escape barely naked from an institute. One of them reaches at a hospital where Dr. Guy Luthan works who is a very good medic and has extreme care of his patients. Unfortunately he can not save the stranger who arrives at him but he has a doubt on the way he dies so now he starts to look for some clues that might bring him the truth and why that man was is such a worse condition.Hugh Grant plays the role very good although Gene Hackman doesn't appear for a very long time in the movie only at the end. This movie leaves us with a question on our minds. Is it good too kill some one in order to save other lives? Dr. Lawrence Myrick has a clinic where he brings homeless peoples or the kind that nobody will miss their absence and carry out on them experiments in witch he can find the cure to paralysis.A rough movie and I think it's one of the best on this topic from the '90 and with two great actors that give a dose of reality witch makes it even more real.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Overlooked at the time of its released back in 1996 the movie "Extreame Measures" like a fine wine seems to get better with each viewing. More then just your average hospital drama the movies thought-provoking premise of sacrificing the few to save the many hunts you as well as its star Hugh Grant, as the overly conscientious Doctor Guy Luthan, long after its shocking and mind numbing ending sequence.Working grueling 90 hours weeks at the Gramancy General Hospitals emergency ward in New York City Dr. Luthan has seen everything there is to see in people being treated there. Thats until one evening when he comes across homeless and naked Claude Minkins, Shaun Austin-Olsen, who was found roaming the streets on NYC with nothing on but a plastic sheet. Minkins seems to have every illness known to medical science and before he can be treated he suffers what's called a complete metabolic meltdown dying right there in his hospital bed! Trying to find out the cause of Minkins death Dr. Luthan hits a stone wall in that his body has mysteriously disappeared, or was stolen, from the hospitals morgue.Told to forget about the now missing Minkins by his boss Dr. Jeff Marko, Paul Guilfoyle, Dr. Luthan instead tries to track down Minkins' fellow homeless friend Teddy Dolson, Andre De Shields, who's name Minkins spurted out just before he suddenly passed away. As things turned out Dr. Luthan finds out that both Minkins and Dolson were treated at the Riverside Neurological Center by non other then the famed and world renowned neurologist Dr. Lawrence Myrick, Gene Hackman. What's even more puzzling to the curious Dr. Luthan is that both Minkins and Dolson's medical records have completely disappeared from the hospital's record files!As Dr. Luthan gets closer to the truth behind what happened to both Minkins and his friend Dolson, who's still out loose on the streets, strange things start to happen to him. His apartment is broken into by someone who has cocaine planted there to have Dr. Luthan both discredited and disbarred from practicing medicine. Knowing that he's sitting on top of a volcano that's about to blow Dr. Luthan with the help of one of his patients the street wise Bobby, John Toles Bey, tracks down the place where both Minkins and Dolson were staying before they ended up at Riverdale Neurological Center! In the underground tunnels in and around Grand Central Center Station with their fellow homeless known as "Mole People". While all this is happening Dr. Myrick has sent out two of his goons FBI Agent Hare, David Morse, and NYPD Detective Berke, Bill Nunn, to stop Dr. Luthan from finding out the reasons behind Minkins and Dolson medical conditions. If it ever came out what secret experiments Dr. Myrick was preforming at the center it would either put him behind bars for the rest of his life or ironically would save the lives of untold thousands of persons if they, with human beings used as guanine pigs, are proved successful!***SPOILERS*** Despite being the villain in the movie you just can't be that critical of Dr. Myrick's motives. What Dr. Myrick is doing in his illegal experiments is trying to save lives by implanting the nerve cells of helpless and in many cases terminally ill homeless people into the spines of the cripples patients he's treating at his hospital. Eariler in the movie Dr. Luthan came across the same dilemma that Dr. Myrick faces, in saving one person at the expense of another, and ended up doing in a split second decision the exact same thing that Dr. Myrick has been doing without a second thought for the last couple of years! It's that disturbing fact on Dr. Luthans part that has him, at the end of the film, continue Dr. Myrick's work despite his misgivings about it!***MAJOR SPOILERS*** Also in the movie is a homely looking, before she made it big on HBO's Sex in the City, Sarah Jessica Parker as Dr. Luthan's both friend and assistant nurse Jodie Trannel. Jodie as it later turned wasn't exactly as sympathetic to her friend Dr. Luthan's cause as she at first appeared to have been. As Dr. Luthan got closer to what was behind Dr. Myrick's secret experiments he was soon to find out that Jodie was somehow connected to them in a both major and family-like way!

Robert J. Maxwell 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.