Horas de angustia

It may not be perfect, but it's everything an action movie should be. Great characters (especially Keaton's great bad guy), explosions, chases, everything. So what if it's predictable. It's plot is better than you'd expect. Usually, the bad guy is just killed at the end. There is no other action movie like "Desperate Measures", because Andy Garcia protects the bag guy from the cops. If you like action movies, rent it. It's no best pic, but it's well worth watching.

Many reviewers have mentioned "cat and mouse games." I think what they mean is that everybody seems to be pursuing everybody else and nobody ever stops to take a breath, including the viewer.

Garcia's nine-year-old boy has leukemia and his life can be saved only by a bone marrow transplant from a compatible donor. Only one such donor is available and he's a lifelong murderer with an IQ of 150. That means he's eligible for MENSA but I doubt they have a chapter in the San Francisco prison system.

San Francisco doesn't have a hospital like this one either. It's the emptiest, darkest hospital you've ever imagined, and it's full of laundry chutes, steam pipes, cross-highway walkways, underground tunnels, and varied niches. If you had to characterize the movie with one still shot, there would be a man pressed against a brick wall, next to a corner, forearm cocked upward, pistol in hand. After evacuation the hospital is nothing more than a gray gaunt shell.

There's that kid, too. Kids are usually a big nuisance in a movie, but this one manages to get by -- no more than that. The kid, Garcia's son, is kidnapped by escaped killer Michael Keaton. He's a strong, brave kid despite his leukemia and we can see the bond between him and Keaton in the offing.

Andy Garcia's character is the most complex because he's torn between two allegiances -- his son and the values of the society that both he and his son are members of. Would you let your child die or would you rather save his life by loosing a killer on the city street? You see what I mean? Keaton's not bad, by the way. I mean, his character is pure evil until his redemption but Keaton's performance is pretty good. He plays the villain as mean, not suave. He's not given any unique traits but that's the writers' problem, not the actors.

It's a curious coincidence but when Keaton first begins to make demands on the corrections officers in return for agreeing to the transplant, he complains that the cigarettes he's given are stale. He and I worked in a movie together, the unforgettable Whatever It Was. I was a bar tender and Keaton was a customer and when the cameras weren't rolling he examined a pack of Property Department cigarettes on the bar and asked if they were stale. "Only if you call a year old 'stale,'" I said.

Little use is made of the Bay Area locations. Nobody hangs by a thread from the Golden Gate bridge or races through Chinatown. Not until the end, anyway, when there is an explosion of action on highways and bridges.

Very little of the story is actually plausible and if constant tension is your thing then your thing is congruent with this movie.

Andy Garcia is the "hero" in this predictable and ludicrous film. He plays Conner, a cop with a son who needs a bone marrow transplant to stay alive. Enter Michael Keaton as McCabe, a mad psychopathic criminal genius (aren't they all?) whose bone marrow is a perfect match. What follows is an irritating battle of wits between Conner and McCabe, who decides he'd like to bust outta the hospital using nothing but a half-swallowed ampoule of a magical elixir, a dislocated thumb and a cigarette lighter flint. Move over MacGuyver.

Garcia is particularly annoying as actor and character. His character is devoted to his son. Nothing wrong with that. Unless your devotion for your son means that EVERYONE ELSE'S life is meaningless and expendable. As McCabe tries to escape from the hospital Conner has to save McCabe's life many times because once dead, his bone marrow is no longer useful. Conner causes a cop to get shot as well as motorway carnage in his attempts to capture McCabe unharmed. I got increasingly more angry watching Garcia as Conner risk everyone he comes into contact with so that his son may have a chance of living. What about the rest of us? Don't we deserve a chance at life too? The Conner character seems to be rooted in the maverick cop tradition, playing by his own rules and deciding what is and isn't right. It's a world where a bully makes the rules and you follow them or face the consequences. Something along the lines of what happened in Germany in the Thirties...

Garcia as actor is annoying to the extreme, spending most of the film tearing about the place in a semi-crouch with one arm stiff by his side for some reason. He trots out his usual bits of actor's business that appear in most Garcia films. He does the scene where he grabs someone's head in both of his hands and speaks/shouts right into their face. He does the scene where he explosively loses he temper and kicks some furniture only to immediately regain control of himself and instantly become the ice-man. He does the scene where he shouts in anger at the top of his lungs, while his face looks as if he has just spent an afternoon staring at the test card. You know the stuff. We've seen it all before.

The film goes on for far too long and credibility is stretched time and again until even the densest viewer's intelligence is insulted. We're encouraged to sympathise with the Garcia character: his wife is dead, his son's dying, he's a cop, he's pretty, he is a devoted father etc etc, but really, all he is, is a self-centred fascist bully.

Keaton has to make flesh a one dimensional cliché of a character and he has a go but is on a losing wicket from the outset. How can you put a new and imaginative slant on the stock Mad Criminal Genius character? And Barbet Schroeder, what were you thinking? From the classic Barfly to this? Pity...

Andy Garcia and Michael Keaton star in the classic policeman vs bad guy story, but with a twist. Garcia is Frank Conner, a cop with a son named Matt who desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. Keaton is Pete McCabe, a hardened prisoner who seems to be the only person in the world who matches little Matt's bone marrow type. So eventually, Pete is talked into giving the marrow transplant, but in reality has a plan for escape, leaving Matt and his father, Frank, with nobody, Frank has no other choice but to find Pete and bring him back alive. This is where the cat and mouse plot begins, after nearly an hour of setting it up.

Desperate Measures had the potential to be so bad. I never would have imagined myself enjoying it this much. Thanks to a rainy day and a few hours to kill, I decided to watch this movie and it exceeded my expectations (which were not very high).

I still would not say this is a great movie. In fact, it is pretty average but Michael Keaton gives an enjoyable performance as a hardened prisoner. Normally, I would expect Garcia to be the bad guy and Keaton to be the cop, but Keaton honestly works out better as the bad guy.

The worst part of the movie has to be the kid, Matt, played by Joseph Cross. Nothing he says or does is what a young child his age would actually be thinking or saying. I am not even really disappointed so much with that, but his delivery was terrible. I know he is just a kid, but there are much better child actors who could have portrayed this much better. All in all, worth about a 7/10.

DESPERATE MEASURES is one of those "high concept" thrillers that the 1990s were so fond of: an entire movie written around a single sentence premise guaranteed to garner interest. This time around, it's simple: a cop's dying child needs a bone marrow transplant and the only matching donor is a jailed killer.

What follows is a movie that starts out on a fairly tense level before gradually become more and more preposterous as it goes on. It soon transpires that the killer, played with relish by Michael Keaton, is intent on using the opportunity to escape, and of course to take down anyone that stands in his way. Said cop Andy Garcia must do everything in his power to stop him.

Much of the film involves a tense stand-off inside a hospital and it's during this section that it starts to get silly. Garcia does things like assisting a criminal to escape and driving his stolen motorbike through glass doors yet at no time do any of the detectives or police force attempt to apprehend him, preferring to let him get on with it.

The plot gradually breaks down and in the end becomes one long chase sequence, filled with all of the over-the-top stunts you'd expect from a '90s-era action movie. The ending is both schmaltzy and expected. While Keaton is good value for money, I always find the staid Garcia a bit of a bore and he's no exception here. Still, if you take it for what it is - and you have a soft spot for laughably OTT direction and nostalgia for the late '90s - then DESPERATE MEASURES does contain a few nuggets of merit along the way.