by John P. Meyer

Turns "do not go gentle into that good night" into "screw you, debilitating fatal disease!"

From the opening scenes of Extraordinary Measures, it's clear that John Crowley (Brendan Fraser) is the father of small kids with really big issues. Both Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez) sport breathing tubes and get around in motorized wheelchairs; when leaving the house on family outings, they take turns boarding the van via its hydraulic lift platform.

The first thing we come to admire about Tom Vaughan's emotional high wire act of a movie is the way it shows us how these two kids -- particularly Megan -- seem to be leading really quite normal lives, in spite of their physical limitations. Megan's having a birthday party at a bowling alley. Dozens of her friends are on hand to help her celebrate. She seems just like any other happy nine-year-old, except for all the handicap-necessitated accoutrements.

Megan, Patrick, their father John, and their mother Aileen (as portrayed by Keri Russell) represent real people. Their true story (as dramatized for the screen) is one of daunting adversity, unbelievable courage, stubborn perseverance in the face of ridiculously long odds, and -- the payoff -- ultimate triumph. Conceptually, Extraordinary Measures riffs off of Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" by amping it up a notch, so that it comes out more like "Screw you, debilitating fatal disease -- we're mad and we're not gonna take it any more!"

As star Harrison Ford pointed out in an interview, making a movie about sick kids is fraught with peril, in that it's all too easy to slide over the edge of objectivity into tear-jerking melodramatic sentimentality. Director Vaughan -- working from a script by Robert Nelson Jacobs (based on the celebrated book by Geeta Anand) -- avoids this pitfall. Which is not to say that you won't find yourself shedding a tear or two before the film's 105-minute runtime is over.

Ford's character -- cutting edge scientist Dr. Robert Stonehill -- is the only entirely fabricated one amongst the leads. As a result of this creative decision, Ford is free to imbue the doc with a range of eccentric (and mildly disagreeable) traits: He's an antisocial loner; he overworks his grad student lab assistants; he plays classic rock at bothersome volume levels. Most problematic for John Crowley (his new research partner and fundraiser): He's got no sense of tact or compromise when it comes to approaching potential corporate investors, upon whom the success of their risky, time-critical venture depends.

And time-critical it is: Megan has already reached the age at which most sufferers of Pompe disease succumb. Unless they get their medicine show on the road, her number (to mix metaphors with abandon) will soon be up.

What's most gratifying about the story is Crowley's refusal to take things at face value. When Megan's doctor tells him and Aileen that "there's nothing more we can do. I'm sorry," Crowley decides to ignore the pronouncement and -- what the Hell? -- act outside the medical-establishment box. In this sense the film becomes a free market libertarian manifesto, as Crowley and Stonehill set out to find a cure outside the pro forma channels. (If Megan and Patrick are to survive, they have no other choice.)

Patrick Bauchau (as Erich Loring) and Jared Harris (as Kent Webber) play key supporting roles as principals in the pharmaceutical corporation that teams with Crowley and Stonehill to attempt the seemingly impossible. But even with their funding in place and their research team geared up, the battle against Pompe (and the grindingly-deliberate pace of FDA bureaucracy) is far from being won.

Most memorable (and voted -- by me! -- most likely to cast open the teary floodgates) is a scene in which corporate employees of big pharma get a visit by sufferers of the disease they are working behind laboratory doors to cure.

Nothing like personalizing the threat to bring a sense of urgency to the proceedings.