Some films are emotionally and intelligently moving enough to make the audience think about certain social issues as they walk away from it, others simply use these issues to give a film authenticity. Directed by Nick Cassavettes, “John Q” lies somewhere in between these two extremes to produce a film that is quickly forgettable, but still worth killing time with.
Denzel Washington (“Training Day”) stars as John Archibald, the perfect Bruce Springsteen muse — a factory worker in rural Illinois who is struggling to make ends meet for his wife and seven-year-old son. Though not living the American dream, the family is happy and in love until fate deals them a cruel hand.
While running to catch second base at his little league game, John’s son collapses on the field from a failing heart. At the hospital, John is told that his son will need a heart transplant or will face certain death. From here, the film takes a nosedive into all-too-familiar territory that is less David vs. Goliath and more good vs. evil.
Due to a snag in John’s insurance policy, he is not able to convince the hospital to put his son’s name on the list of patients needing available hearts for transplant. As he desperately tries to raise money by selling nearly everything he owns and accepting donations from his kindly neighbors, he hits a profound number of dead ends and is constantly living with the fear of having to take his son home to watch him slowly die.
When the hospital threatens to send his son home due to another ridiculous financial snag, John takes matters into his own hands a la “Falling Down” and holds patients and staff hostage in the hospital’s emergency room until his son’s name is admitted on the transplant list.
As if Cassavettes saw the “Falling Down” similarity before we did, Robert Duvall (“The Apostle”) is cast as the aging cop who tries to negotiate with John, all the while seeming to sympathize with his plight better than the rest of the world.
Outside on the streets surrounding the hospital, he squares off with media-hounding, trigger-happy police chief (Ray Liotta, “Hannibal”), and the crowd cheers on John as a man of the people. Inside the E.R., John debates health care with a colorful assortment of characters that include the wisecracking Eddie Griffin and the rich, slime ball surgeon played by James Woods (in a major stretch here).
The rest of the movie borrows from just about every other ordinary-men-in-extraordinary-circumstances film by portraying journalists as soulless, desperate pricks and police officers as trigger happy jocks eager to get the bad guy.
After getting through a ridiculous amount of nail-biting cliffhangers, the situation finally ends and Cassavettes bombards the audience with clips of talk-show personalities debating the moral and ethical layers surrounding health care issues, including an inevitable cameo by Jay Leno in a deafeningly blatant attempt to get the audience to think about the issues surrounding the film. But given its overall quality, we might have been better suited with a simple public service announcement.
Grade: B/C