Metacritic reviews

I found myself debating the film's moral questions on the way out of the theater.

Extreme Measures, a new medical thriller with Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman as doctors with differing views on medical ethics, is an episode of "Beauty and the Beast" grafted onto an episode of "ER" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Extreme Measures is a suspense picture that should excite thinking audiences as well as thrill-crazy ones. One possible exception: fans of Michael Palmer's novel, who may wonder why his plot and people disappeared. But after all, in movies as in medicine, extreme measures may be necessary.

Brisk and unsettling.

Extreme Measures is far from a classic. But it begins well and sustains its suspenseful tone for about two-thirds of its length...Grant's performance is one of the best things in the movie.

Hackman's role requires him to spend so little time on screen that it's virtually an above-the-title cameo, and Grant trots out his trademark charming mannerisms, which look a bit fresher than usual by virtue of the darker than usual context. Be warned: Director Michael Apted does not resist the temptation to preach.

This chilling look at emergency room politics wrestles contemporary medical ethics to an unsatisfactory draw. Similarly, its mix of real and exaggerated situations doesn't quite jell, making for a commercial diagnosis that's good but not great.

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.

The forced hybrid of a preposterous potboiler plot with genuine questions of medical ethics, Extreme Measures is weakened, not strengthened, by its strange bedfellows shenanigans. And the fact that director Michael Apted is able to put considerable realism and skill into his filmmaking merely emphasizes how out to lunch this picture’s story is.

It’s too bad the script never allows their ethical battle over human guinea pigs to rise above the level of plot device. With these actors, the debut film from Grant and Hurley should have soared above TV mediocrity. What the hell were they thinking?