John Q. is the most reckless, dangerous film to come along since the reprehensible and similarly themed Light It Up.  Both pictures feature black characters resorting to violence – hostage-taking, specifically – when they don't get their way.  That wouldn't be such a bad thing if these criminals got their due punishment at the end, but, as in its irresponsible brethren, Q doesn't, and it's crafted in such a way that makes people cheer for and sympathize with a character who breaks the law and jeopardizes the safety of a whole lot of people.

After taking a brief (and completely overrated) break from his typical proud-black-man-against-the-world roles with Training Day, Denzel Washington plays the titular John Q. Archibald, a blue-collar factory worker who gets shafted by The Man in various ways, via the bank (they repossessed his car), NAFTA (his reduced hours are due to the exodus of factory jobs to Mexico) and, finally, his health insurance provider and the hospital.  The latter occurs when his son Mike (Daniel E. Smith) collapses during a baseball game and is rushed to the hospital, where doctors say he'll die without a heart transplant.

Clearly, this is upsetting news for John and his wife Denise (Kimberly Elise, Bait), as they have little money and their health insurance won't pay for the operation because they view it as elective surgery.  The transplant will cost $250,000, and the Archibalds need to cough up $30,000 before the hospital will even put Mike's name on the recipient list.  This is a daunting task for a guy who pulls down around $18,200 per annum, but John tries to raise money from his church and by selling everything but the kitchen sink. There is also a great deal of time spent filling out documents and waiting in the wrong lines for various forms of public assistance, which is usually followed by John yelling at clerks who probably aren't much better off than he is.

Finally, the hospital folk, led by cardiologist Dr. Turner (James Woods, Scary Movie 2) and director Rebecca Payne (Anne Heche, The Third Miracle), prepare to jettison Mike from their care.  This prompts Denise to nag John into doing something, which somehow translates into him taking the entire emergency care department hostage with a handgun.  (Where'd he get it?  Why didn't he sell it already?)  "This hospital's under new management," John declares, but then quickly finds himself bogged down with inexperienced employees, annoying patients and language barriers.  God, Miss Payne, this hospital stuff ain't as easy as it looks!

The rest of Q plays out like Lorenzo's Oil crossed with Mad City and The Negotiator (Hannibal's Ray Liotta plays the clueless police chief, while Gone in 60 Seconds' Robert Duvall is crusty hostage negotiator Frank Grimes, which is really funny if you're a fan of The Simpsons).  The whole thing turns into a big media circus, complete with citizens cheering for the lawbreaker, a la O.J.'s Bronco chase.  The thing that really got me was a quote from Liotta in Q's press notes – "What John Q does is very heroic, but it's not the right thing to do, and we're not condoning it."  Right.  Why does Jackass need a lengthy disclaimer, but films like this slip by unchallenged?

It's bad enough Q tries to squeeze in heady messages about gun control, healthcare and workers' rights (besides, how seriously can you take a film that wants to stick it to The Man and his nefarious HMOs but was shot in Canada to save money?), but it also insists on playing up the button-pushing race thing.  It goes out of its way to portray the Archibalds as good, church-goin' folks with white friends and everything – the early scenes show John rubbing elbows with white friends (including Mulholland Drive's Laura Harring) at work and at his son's baseball game.  But once they get to the hospital, there isn't another black face in sight.  The hospital people are so slick and uncaring that they may as well have worn horns and carried pitchforks as they tossed around their big, fancy words.  We don't see anyone of color until John starts waving his gun around.

Director Nick Cassavetes (She's So Lovely) should know better, though he does the best he can from James Kearns' dopey script (it's his first film, but he did write episodes of Highway To Heaven and Jake and the Fat Man).  Q's ending is a complete cop-out that is, literally, telegraphed from its first scene.  For a while, it looked like the film would be a 24-esque race against the clock, showing every dramatic drop in Mike's systolic blood pressure like the final seconds of the Super Bowl ticking away, but, thankfully, that stopped after a while.  Q does look nice (it was photographed by Quills' Rogier Stoffers) and it also has a strange (and probably totally coincidental) posthumous nod to director Ted Demme.

1:52 –

for violence, language and intense thematic elements