Grade:  C

Director:  Nick Cassavetes		Released:  February 2002
Writer:  James Kearns		MPAA Rating:  PG-13
Players:  Denzel Washington		Running time:  116 minutes

Ratings System

John Q's script is not very good.  It's preachy with its anti-HMO message.  It has gratuitous scenes.  For example, the early scenes of the family are neither effective nor warranted.  It has bad dialog.  For example, the wife, upon bringing her son into the ER, immediately starts tirading against the doctors for no apparent reason.  It's rife with stereotypes.  For example, the fat security guard, the abusive boyfriend, the loving pregnant couple, the media loving police chief, the distraught and hysterical wife and mother, on and on it goes.  And finally, it's just plain dumb.  For example, another in the long line of genius hacker TV-truck technicians manages to break into a closed-circuit monitoring system to see what's going on inside the hospital.

Luckily, it has Denzel Washington.  He is really the only thing that makes this movie watchable for the first hour or so, but then some interesting developments finally take place in the story to hold the viewer's attention.  But even then, without Washington, this film would really be horrible.

It's an okay movie, but the script is nowhere near compelling enough or refined enough to have attracted the amount of talent it did.  As the parade of big-name actors marched across the screen (Denzel Washington, James Woods, Anne Heche, Ray Liotta, Robert Duvall, Eddie Griffin, Jay Leno), I was wondering how in the world they had been attracted to this material.  Then it finally hit me, they wanted to be a part of sending this "important" message to the public.  Nothing gets celebrities more worked up than the possibility of getting behind a good liberal cause.

- crocoPuffs