John Q (2002)

I would consider myself a fan of Denzel Washington. I'm not a completist with his filmography, but I've seen an above average number of his movies. Because of this, I was suprised when I stumbled into this movie recently. The movie stars Denzel Washington as John Quincy Archibald, or John Q. It also features Robert Duvall as Lt. Frank Grimes, Kimberly Elise as Denise Archibald, James Woods as Dr. Raymond Turner, and various other more minor parts. The movie centers around Mike Archibald (Daniel E. Smith) falling ill at a baseball game and the family discovering that he would need a heart transplant in order to survive. The Archibald family lives in a factory town and John Q works in the factory. But lately things have been a little slow at the factory and his hours have been cut back. John Q has been trying to make ends meet on the shorter hours, but he has continued to pay for his health insurance policy. While Mike is in the hospital, Denise and John Q begin to navigate the beuracracy of the hospital administrators. They are notified that they don't have the proper insurance to provide for Mike's care and that they will need to take him home. John Q is indignant at this news. He's been paying into his policy all this time. When John Q calls his employer to find out what's going wrong he's informed that because he's working less hours his employer changed his policy without telling him and he has already maxed out this lesser policy. John Q keeps doing everything he can to raise funds to pay for his son's care. He's also appealing the issues with his health insurance. Everytime he thinks he's working things out the hospital beauracracy throws another road block in his path. John Q finally has enough and snaps. He brings a gun and takes Dr. Turner hostage along with the emergency room. John Q uses his hostages to demand the hospital provide his sons heart transplant. As things progress we learn that John Q intends to be the provider of the heart by taking his own life. At the last possible moment we learn that a heart has become available through the regular means and the hospital agrees to put the heart in Mike. I feel like this movie is a little bit of a time capsule. There's a lot of conversations about HMO's, which was common at this time but you really don't hear about anymore. The subject matter was close to the director's (Nick Cassavete's) heart as his daughter Sasha was born with a congenital heart defect. I was surprised to see that this movie has a low metacritic rating of just 30. There's a big discrepancy between that first rating and it's IMDb aggregate rating of 7.1 *'s. I think this latter rating is much closer to where it should be as I give this 7 out of 10 *'s.