What was Denzel Washington thinking? Fresh off roles in 1998’s The Hurricane (Academy Award Winner – Lead Actor), the nationally recognized 2000’s Remember the Titans, and 2002’s Training Day (Academy Award Winner – Lead Actor), Denzel was arguably at the peak of his acting career. He likely commanded (or was close to it) more guaranteed money per film than any other actor in America. He probably was receiving dozens of roles at a single time. And yet he chose to accept the lead role in unproven Nick Cassavetes’s (Alpha Dog, She’s So Lovely) 2002’s John Q.

I saw this movie in the theater on my 26th birthday. I had narrowed my choice to two films, John Q and Hart’s War. I made a poor choice. I saw Hart’s War years later, and while I didn’t love it, I found it to be a halfway-decent movie. John Q was not. At 23% fresh, it is Washington’s lowest-rated movie in his entire career (at least up until the writing of this 2020 review). This movie is the type of trash you’d find on late-night cable with no-name actors on a six-figure budget. How it made $72 million domestically and $102 million worldwide is beyond me. However, I will attribute most of this to Washington’s name-power alone. I certainly don’t think John Q hurt his stock by any means. Since 1987’s Cry Freedom and certainly since 1989’s Glory, Washington has been among Hollywood’s elite. However, there was an 11-year gap between Oscar nominations (Training Day – 2002) and Flight (2013). And the start of that gap began with John Q.

There is so much to trash about this movie. While it is entertaining, it is trying to be serious in what it is saying, and not only is it utterly ridiculous and zoomed past that in the first 30 minutes alone. I *think* its underlying statement was that universal healthcare in this country is and was a big problem, and Cassavetes wanted to shed light on that. But all of the hoops that John Q Archibald (Washington) has to go through to figure out what his insurance benefits were would have taken days, if not a week. Yet, we are supposed to assume that he can rationally do all of this on his house phone in one afternoon…on a Saturday afternoon. Yes, it is true. The United States health care is a mess. HMO versus PPO versus POS. Trying to determine the difference between them and what is best for you and your family is a pain. It is even more challenging when your employer offers multiple comprehensive plans (such as the organization I work for). The plan I picked when I did the onboarding process with my company back in 2000 is the one I have today. I haven’t considered changing my plan simply because I’ve had no interest in going through the process of changing everything.

Copays, coinsurance, deductibles, premiums, claims, reimbursement, preexisting conditions, excluded services, non-preferred providers, out-of-pocket limits, primary care providers, and a variety of other annoying health insurance terms are enough to make a sane person go crazy. Trying to figure out a billing statement can seem as confounding as filling out a tax return. Yet, John, whose insurance recently changed, can track down a handful of agents on a weekend afternoon. While he doesn’t get the answers he wants, it’s impressive that he can do this and do it so calmly, considering that his child is in the hospital and has only a handful of days or, at most, a couple of weeks to live if he doesn’t get a heart transplant.

John’s third-grade son Mikey, a presumably healthy child, suddenly collapses while running the bases in his Little League baseball game. John and his wife Denise (Kimberly Elise – Ad Astra, The Manchurian Candidate) rush Mikey to the hospital. Cardiologist Dr. Turner (James Woods – Salvador, Ghosts of Mississippi) tells the Archibalds that their son’s heart is three times its normal size, and he needs an immediate heart transplant, or he will die. And if Dr. Turner isn’t the bearer of bad news, then that title would undoubtedly belong to Rebecca (Anne Heche – Donnie Brasco, Return to Paradise), the cutthroat hospital administrator. Rebecca informs John and Denise in under an hour that their insurance plan doesn’t cover the surgery and that the family doesn’t have enough assets (the surgery costs an even $225,000, and the downpayment, so to speak, is $75,000). Without that $75,000 in cash, the operation cannot be performed. Why Dr. Turner is with Rebecca as she explains the billing is a question in itself.

So while Mikey is dying and John is not on the phone getting shot down about his health care insurance, he is haggling over whether his color television is worth more than the $20 a man offers him at a makeshift rummage sale. He’s too calm while his son is dying. When Denise presses him on his need to do something quickly as his son is about to be released from the hospital (because of lack of money on the part of the Archibaulds), John takes the emergency room hostage with his gun. He demands that his son gets moved to the top of the heart transplant recipient list, and when that does occur, the doctor performs the surgery immediately. It is a ridiculous premise.

The other patients in the ER become his hostages. How one man can control a situation with so many people, open hallways, etc., is laughable. What I witnessed in the plot, character development, dialog, acting, and everything else was embarrassing. While Washington did everything he could to make this movie credible, there was no getting around the absurd plot or caricature characters. These characters included hostages like Lester (Eddie Griffin – Undercover Brother, Scary Movie 3), who was in there because of a hand injury, or Mitch (Shawn Hatosy – TNT’s Animal Kingdom, TNT’s Southland). This lowlife is in there with his girlfriend, whom we learn that he is abusing, who tries to become the hero by taking John down on his own at one point.

Lt. Grimes (Robert Duvall – The Apostle, The Judge) serves the all-too-familiar role of a chief hostage negotiator. He tries to befriend John by relating to him as best as he can so that he can release those he is holding and end the standoff without any injuries or casualties. Meanwhile, local television stations have tapped into the police feed and are broadcasting standoffs for everyone to watch. Police Chief Monroe (Ray Liotta – Unlawful Entry, Field of Dreams) tries to one-up Grimes by keeping him out of the loop and doing his own thing.

Even from the start, we know how this movie will end. Is this movie going to allow cute little Mikey to die? Of course not. The take on US healthcare is an important one, but not to the point where you put a gun to a surgeon’s head and order him to perform a surgery that he isn’t even capable of performing before he has a heart that he can use. In either case, everything that John did after he pulled a gun in the hospital was utterly ridiculous to the point of being laughable. At this point, no one was taking the movie seriously. A film this negligent, rushed, and downright outrageous might be okay for some mindless entertainment. But the topic at hand is too severe for that to even really work. This movie wants to be a suspenseful drama, but a bad episode of ER would have even been more substantial. In every way, John Q was an utter failure. Denzel fired a dud.

Plot 4/10
Character Development 3/10
Character Chemistry 3/10
Acting 6/10
Screenplay 3/10
Directing 2/10
Cinematography 4/10
Sound 1/10
Hook and Reel 4/10
Universal Relevance 5/10
35%

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