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Dir. Tom Vaughan
Rating: 4.0 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Lance Duroni
As a general rule, scientific discovery rarely translates to the silver screen without some embellishment that lands it in the realm of science fiction. Stories about venture capital and the inner workings of corporate America usually require some form of sensational intrigue to spice them up as well. Here, director Tom Vaughan bets that the star power of Harrison Ford and the irresistible melodrama of sick kids can overcome the narrative obstacles inherent to these topics. If there were any justice in Hollywood, Vaughan would lose his shirt for the wager.
It’s not that the story upon which the film is based isn’t inspiring. To the contrary, the story of John Crowley (Brendan Fraser), a man who literally gave everything else in his life up to save his kids, is a concentrated injection of hope pounded through the sternum and directly into the heart. Crowley leaves his position as a corporate executive to start a biotech company in order to find a cure for Pompe, a rare terminal disease, that affects two of his children. He enlists the help of Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), an eccentric and standoffish medical researcher who needs Crowley’s business acumen to turn his theoretical genius into a tangible treatment. Ford does a decent job of making Stonehill likable, but the character is an irredeemable walking cliché. He plays classic rock really loud in the lab, much to the consternation of his nerdy underlings. He drives an old beat-up truck and drinks a lot of beer while looking over data. At one point Crowley’s wife, an emaciated Keri Russell, actually exclaims “Okay, I get that he’s a loose cannon.” My thoughts exactly.
Confined to wheelchairs and losing control of their muscles, the children’s plight occasionally tugs on the heartstrings. When not hooked up to a ventilator, the overly plucky Megan Crowley (Meredith Droeger) engages in playful banter with Dr. Stonehill that is supposed to demonstrate her strong will in the face of adversity, but she really just comes off sounding like a brat. Finally, there’s John Crowley himself. Let’s just say that Brendan Fraser is better suited to playing a caveman alongside Paulie Shore than a businessman alongside Harrison Ford. The film may be nothing more than a really expensive Lifetime movie, but film students can at least study its many bio-lab and boardroom montage sequences. They do give the impression that the action is moving forward even though the film rarely accelerates beyond a sappy standstill.
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