Desperate Measures

As a friend says, "There's money in muck." He's in the goat manure business.

You've probably gathered the plot from the shorts and ads. Michael Keaton plays a convicted nasty killer called McCabe who is taken out of jail to provide bone marrow for cop Keaton (Andy Garcia's) son (Jeremiah Cassidy). He escapes in the operating theatre and then the chase is on, except that the cop doesn't want the crook dead.

There are some pretty good gun battles I suppose, with Michael Keaton doing his best, if inadequate, Hannibal Lecter impersonation, and Andy Garcia a bit too bland for my money in the cop role, but I'll confine the rest of my criticism to those on medical grounds.

The bad guy has to avoid the effects of the anaesthetic he'll be given in order to escape the law. His chance will come when they are about to start pumping the bone marrow out of his bones. So in prison he gets hold of a vial of Narcane, a drug which is used by ambulance officers to counteract the effects of heroin overdose. Narcane is given intravenously or intramuscularly. You certainly don't give it by mouth.

Keaton swallows the vial in prison but attaches it to his teeth with some cotton. He then regurgitates the vial and presumably crunches the vial between his teeth to get the Narcane to work. But that just wouldn't work!

There is also some chatter between the doctor (Marcia Gay Hayden) and the police demanding that McCabe be placed on his side for the anaesthetic, presumably for an epidural injection into McCabe's spine, the police agree, but the next shot shows McCabe flat on his back, not on his side, and getting juiced up by means of a face mask!

It's all well and good to stretch credibility in movies, but you'd better make the rest of the film convincing, or at least entertaining, if you're going to come up with rubbish like that.