History Film / ExtremeMeasures

-->'''Myrick:''' People die every day. And for what? For nothing. Plane crash. Train wreck, ''Bosnia.'' Pick your tragedy. Sniper at a restaurant, fifteen dead, Story at Eleven. What do we do? What do ''you'' do? You change the channel, you move onto the next patient, you take care of the ones you think you can save. Good doctors do the correct thing. ''Great'' doctors have the guts to do the ''right'' thing. Your father had those guts. So do you.

-->'''Myrick:''' People die every day. And for what? For nothing. What do we do? What do *you* do? You take care of the ones you think you can save. Good doctors do the correct thing. Great doctors have the guts to do the right thing. Your father had those guts.

-->'''Myrick:''' If you could cure cancer by killing ''one'' person, wouldn't you ''have'' to do that? Wouldn't that be the brave thing? ''One'' person, and cancer's gone tomorrow!

-->'''Myrick:''' If you could cure cancer by killing ''one'' person, wouldn't you ''have'' to do that? ''One'' person dead, and cancer's gone tomorrow!

* [[spoiler:PassingTheTorch]]: [[spoiler:Myrick's wife hands over all the research data to Dr. Luthan at the end.]]

[[quoteright:255:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/extreme_measures.jpg]]

''Extreme Measures'' is a 1996 thriller film based on Michael Palmer's 1991 novel of the same name, about the ethics of how far we are willing to go, and how much we are willing to sacrifice, in order to cure the world's ills.

Creator/HughGrant plays Guy Luthan, a British doctor working at a hospital in New York who starts making unwanted inquiries when the body of a man who died in his emergency room disappears. The trail leads Luthan to the door of the eminent surgeon Dr. Lawrence Myrick (Creator/GeneHackman), but Luthan soon finds himself in danger from people who want the hospital's secret to remain undiscovered.

* MohsScaleOfSciFiHardness: Recent breakthroughs have managed to regenerate spinal cord nerves in ''mice''. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10895816 In the film, similar results were announced on lab rats, to which Myrick sarcastically says he's sure the world's rat population is going to rejoice.

* AntiVillain: Myrick.
* ArcWords: ''Triphase''.

* GoodCopBadCop
* HeKnowsTooMuch: Or rather, "he's ''going'' to know too much".
* HospitalHottie: Jodie Trammel, a nurse.
* IDidWhatIHadToDo: Arguably, everyone that works with Dr. Myrick.

* JustThinkOfThePotential: Myrick to Luthan.

* TheMole: [[spoiler:Trammel.]]

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: [[spoiler: Hare accidentally killing Myrick.]]
* TheNeedsOfTheMany: Myrick's motivation -- or excuse.

* [[spoiler:PassingTheTorch]]: [[spoiler:Myrick's wife hands over all the research data to Dr. Luthan at the end.]

* [[spoiler:PassingTheTorch]]: [[spoiler:Myrick's wife hands over all the research data to Dr. Luthan at the end.]]

* DisposableVagrant: The film opens with one of those vagrants seeking help from Hugh Grant's character, having escaped from the experiments. Having looked such a man in the eye, he's less willing to accept the later justification that such people were making a HeroicSacrifice to help those paralyzed by spinal damage walk again. As he notes, it wasn't their ''choice'' to make that sacrifice.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: At the end, Luthan is working at NYU's Neurology Department. How he was cleared of the drug charges is not shown, as otherwise they probably wouldn't hire him (and of course he'd still be facing a trial). Dialog between Luthan and a colleague suggests that there was a time skip between scenes. Jodie is mentioned as starting over again in the Fall. This would indicate a major criminal investigation had taken place with the conspirators pleading out or facing trials of their own.