BODY SNATCHING

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Out there on surgery's cutting edge, as it were, everyone is potentially Dr. Victor Frankenstein, M.D. For, as the movies nearly always have it, there comes a time in every eminent croaker's career when chimpanzees just won't do experimentally and the advancement of science requires a little (strictly idealistic) body snatching.

In Extreme Measures, the bodies are still warm and kicking. Also writhing and babbling, at least in the case of one victim who escapes from his medical abductors and turns up in a New York City trauma room presided over by Dr. Guy Luthan (Hugh Grant). There the poor fellow sets all the diagnostic dials to spinning inexplicably. Not to mention Luthan's highly ethical brain. For the man dies in mysteriously untreatable agony, and then his body disappears before a proper autopsy can be performed. Investigating, Luthan soon finds himself conspired against--with his job, a fellowship, life itself all placed in fairly suspenseful, smartly realized jeopardy by director Michael Apted.

It's not hard to figure out, however, who the source of his troubles is. The minute Gene Hackman appears as world-class physician Lawrence Myrick, oozing menacing bonhomie, a quality this splendid actor has virtually patented, we have our suspicions. It's the extent and passion of the conspiracy he has mounted to protect his research that is surprising and scary. That air of earnest befuddlement Grant has deployed to such good comic effect in the past serves him--and us--very well in this very different context. He's willowy and vulnerable in a way we no longer expect to find in action-movie protagonists, and for this film his affect is the great redeeming virtue.

--By Richard Schickel