John Q
Denzel Washington as a working father who takes an emergency room hostage when his insurance won't cover his young son's life-saving heart transplant. A blunt, angry drama that critics panned and audiences turned into a hit — and that landed as a lightning rod in America's healthcare debate.
Released February 15, 2002 and directed by Nick Cassavetes, John Q stars Denzel Washington as John Quincy Archibald, a factory worker whose son collapses and needs a heart transplant his health insurance refuses to cover. Out of options, John takes the hospital's emergency room hostage to force doctors to place his son on the transplant list. Robert Duvall plays the police negotiator, Ray Liotta the police chief, James Woods the cardiologist, and Kimberly Elise John's wife.
The film is unabashedly a message movie about the American healthcare system, and critics savaged it for it — a 26% Rotten Tomatoes score, with the consensus that it "pounds the audience over the head with its message," while singling out Washington's performance as rising above the material.
Audiences disagreed with the critics: made for about $36 million, John Q grossed $102.2 million worldwide, $71.8 million of it domestically. It arrived at a charged moment for its star — released just weeks before Washington won the Best Actor Academy Award in March 2002 for the previous year's Training Day — and its premise about the cost of care kept it a reference point in political argument for years afterward.
Similar items
Antitrust
A tech-industry thriller starring Ryan Phillippe as a young programmer recruited by a charming but sinister software CEO (Tim Robbins) who steals code and eliminates threats. Released with Microsoft's real antitrust battle still in the headlines, it became a cult artifact of the dot-com era despite critical and commercial failure.
Big Fish
Tim Burton's warmest film: a dying father who has always told his life as a series of tall tales — a giant, a witch who shows your death in her eye, a perfect hidden town called Spectre — and the grown son trying to sort truth from myth before it's too late. Ewan McGregor plays the young father in the fables, Albert Finney the old man telling them.
O
Tim Blake Nelson's modern Othello, relocated to an elite Southern prep school where basketball replaces Venice's wars. Mekhi Phifer as the only Black student and star athlete, Josh Hartnett as the jealous rival, Julia Stiles as Desdemona. It was made to be released in 1999—but held from the world for two years after Columbine.
The Rules of Attraction
Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.