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.
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