Desperate Measures is a 1998 American action thriller film starring Michael Keaton, Andy García, Marcia Gay Harden and Brian Cox, directed by Barbet Schroeder.

San Francisco police officer and widowed father Frank Conner is in a frantic search for a compatible bone marrow donor for his leukemia-stricken son, Matt.

McCabe initially shows little interest in helping Conner, but later finds an opportunity to turn the situation to his advantage and devises a plot to escape.

Biding his time, he plays chess against a computer, easily defeating the program, and expresses the need for a challenge akin to Garry Kasparov or Deep Blue.

Meanwhile, Conner, along with police captain Cassidy and Matt's physician, Dr. Hawkins, prepare for McCabe to be transferred to the hospital for the organ transplant.

With the aid of a counteracting drug he had obtained from a fellow inmate, McCabe slips out of his restraints, attacks the guards and surgeons and attempts to escape.

McCabe causes an explosion with propane tanks, seizes control of the hospital's adjacent wing, holds guards hostage and orders a lockdown of the building.

[5] Klass spoke of the final film with frustration as not only had the rewrites shifted the story from taking place in a small town to a major city, but also felt the film's depiction of childhood cancer patients as weak, frail, and pitiful was completely at odds with what he'd observed in his research at Los Angeles children's cancer wards and his attempt to respectfully depict the energy and optimism they'd displayed.

[7] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "By the time Desperate Measures degenerates into an old-fashioned car chase, you may wish you were watching General Hospital.

Although I suspect there is plenty of bone marrow and leukemia-related preposterousness here, my limited medical education precludes me from informed eyeball-rolling.