Desperate Measures, starring Andy Garcia as a good-guy San Francisco cop and Michael Keaton as an escaped killer whose bone marrow is the only possible match that can save the life of Garcia’s young son, on the other hand, demands absolutely nothing of us.

An empty-suit, Hollywood concept, this improbable and unpleasant would-be thriller has all of director Barbet Schroeder’s characteristic jaded sophistication with none of his redeeming dark humor. In his Reversal of Fortune, which had both, his sensibility provided the perfect context for the the fine performances of Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as Claus and Sunny von Bulow. Since that nastily elegant feast in 1990, however, Schroeder has seen seven years of famine – the edgy but turgid Single White Female, the forgettable Kiss of Death. Desperate Measures has only scattered moments that remind us of the wicked sparks this director can strike with the right screenplay. David Klass didn’t provide him one, here: Measures doesn’t just strain credibility, it yanks it like a slingshot and pops it in the viewer’s face.