Highly Overrated But Still Good

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I recorded this last night on Encore Suspense, and it really looked promising. Great cast, great director, stylish opening titles (that's becoming a lost art), and an interesting premise.Tonight I watched it. My jaw dropped, but for all the wrong reasons. In essence, Michael Keaton plays the Roadrunner, and Andy Garcia plays Wile E. Coyote. The big switch is that the coyote wants to catch the roadrunner because the coyote's son needs a bone marrow transplant and the roadrunner is a perfect match.Garcia's character is a police officer who very improbably arranges for Keaton to be released from prison so that the transplant can be done in a San Francisco hospital. Of course, complications ensue. Unfortunately, so does hilarity.It is admirable that Garcia's character, a widower, wants his child to survive. But after Keaton escapes he kills or injures dozens of police officers and hospital staff, but Garcia continually subverts attempts to capture or kill Keaton. As the Police Captain asks Garcia, "How many people are going to have to die here tonight so that kid of yours can live?"At first the film is entertaining. Keaton rightly realizes that the script is an improbable dud, so he has fun with it. But when he makes his big escape and slides down a laundry chute with a shock paddle in each hand to slow his fall it's clear that we've left the Earth's gravitational pull far behind us.It's good to see Keaton working. He's a fine actor who makes a lot of films, they just don't get released. But, good Lord, this was his next film after JACKIE BROWN. Is he that hard up for work?The much discussed in these pages ending, which I will not reveal, is predictable and even more unbelievable than anything else in the film. It's a perfect example of OK, smooth move, but what are you going to do now? What does NOT happen in the ending was that Garcia's son coming out from under sedation and speaking to his Dad in Keaton's voice. That's where the second star came from.Parents' note: Violence, profanity, gore, and an unforgivable scene in which a gun is aimed at a child's head.Trivia note: Later on Keaton starred in JACK FROST as a musician who neglects his family, dies, and comes back as a snowman. No, really, that's what happens. It's bad enough to count as a crime against humanity. The little boy who plays Garcia's son in DESPERATE MEASURES plays Keatons' son in JACK FROST.

Desperate Measures is an action thriller film that stars Michael Keaton, Andy García, Marcia Gay Harden and Brian Cox.The film was directed by Barbet Schroeder. It was filmed in both the San Francisco Bay Area and downtown Pittsburgh.Garcia stars as Frank Conner, a widowed San Francisco police officer whose young son Matt is suffering from leukemia. Without a bone marrow transplant, Matt will die, but Frank isn't a donor. In fact, the only potential match is prison inmate Peter McCabe (Keaton), a psychotic but charming serial killer. At first, McCabe refused to participate despite Conner's pleas, but eventually, the convict relents and agrees to the procedure. It is all a ruse, however, as McCabe has discovered a clever way to escape the confines of the operating room where Matt's oncologist, Dr. Hawkins (Harden) is scheduled to perform the transplant. Faced with the dual nightmare of his son's deteriorating condition and a mass murderer on the loose in a major metropolitan hospital, the frantic Conner finds himself bending and even breaking the law to bring McCabe down and save Matt's life.Too bad that the film is only masquerading as a thoughtful movie that's really about something. At heart, it's an action thriller--a chase picture. It has all the usual implausible or impossible stunts, the highway carnage, the jumps off bridges, the slides down laundry chutes, and other feats that make it more of a video game than a drama.This unfortunately makes it an average picture that would thrill action fans.

The title of my review says it all, really. Shroeder and Klass took a type of movie that usually doesn't surpass the level of popcorn entertainment (which is fine), and delivered a movie that can still be enjoyed with some good popcorn, but at the same time subverts the genre script-wise and in terms of editing, by constantly confusing the viewer's sense of who to root for, and adds aesthetic depth in terms of very cool shots, situations and cuts. You'll hate this if you're the high falutin' critic type, but if you come prepared to see a popcorn action movie that happens to be shown through the eyes of Barbet f*cking Shroeder, you're in the right place.

I really wanted to see this film - I thought the plot was really unique and intriguing. A cop (Andy Garcia) has a son who is dying and needs bone marrow replacement in order to live. The only match is a convicted serial killer, who escapes from jail. To save his son he has to track down the killer.Michael Keaton plays the convict in one of many disappointing aspects of the film. Keaton is a great actor at times but here he is pretty much boring. It's over-the-top to the point where you just stop caring.Garcia is better but tries too hard for a film that isn't up to par. Barbet Schroeder (at one time such a promising director with films like "Barfly" that amounted to pretty much nothing in the American market) directs well enough - I honestly thought the script was the culprit here...it's just a big mess.The film ultimately wastes a lot of good material, good actors and a good director - all because of a faulty script. What should have been a tense and thought-provoking film is just a Hollywood action dud.