Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18889 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-10-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 112 minutes

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington) is struggling through a recession trying to provide for his son Mikey (Daniel E. Smith) and his waitress wife (Kimberly Elise). Mikey collapses at a Little League game and is rushed to a hospital. The situation is bleak. Only a heart transplant will save Mikey's life. John's HMO refuses to cover the expensive surgery. With the hospital and his insurance provider unwilling to help and his wife pleading with John to act, he takes matters into his own hands, holding the hospital's renowned heart surgeon (James Woods) and several others hostage in an emergency care wing until the surgery will be performed.
Nick Cassavetes directed this attack on the American health care system. Like his previous feature, SHE'S SO LOVELY, Cassavetes proves adept at mining the political ramifications out of human drama. The film criticizes hospitals and health care providers for working in collusion against the working class. This moving drama is propelled by the intense lead performance by Washington as one man against an unjust system.

Customer Reviews

false moral
This film I think is basically failed because it rests over false charity and a main erroneous principle: life of a child with a deadly disease is however more worth that these of his father, a healthy and still young adult.
The plot is shown in gross traces: John Q, an Afroamerican man, worker of heavy machinery but traversing temporal difficulties to find a full time job, has a little son over 7 years old who suffers a dismay. John has a medical insurance policy and his son enters in the correspondent hospital. That's a good hospital, but the child need nothing less than a heart transplantation or he will die. The big problem is there are no hearts easily and the cheap insurance policy of John Q doesn't covers by far such expensive intervention. Hopeless, John resources to all things to join more money, but such operation costs 250000 dollars. He attains to get only about 20000. Pressed to the limit also by his wife, finally John Q takes the decision to assault with a pistol the emergency hall of the hospital. He menaces with killing everybody here if his son isn't attended. Police intervenes, but as the demands of John are impossible to satisfy, he decides to kill himself and donate his own heart to his son.
This is the core of this movie fully unbelievable and I think a psychological error, although spectacular for people who hasn't little experience of life. The film shows well some deficiencies of the USA health services, but real fathers in such terrible situation must resign, and although very painful, in real life, probably they engender another son. For me this film assumes an unbelievable thesis. In a interval, John prays to God for a miracle and charity, and this is the case these charity happens owing to an opportune car accident that provides the desired heart from a woman killed in the crash, but one asks himself what class of charity and luck had the dead woman That's a clear concession to avoid a real, bitter ending. Summing up, a Manichaean movie with plain, gross trace characters roughly divided between bad or misery people vs. good people, little acceptable as the problems dealt are real but require more fine treatment.

Health is a basic human right
This film is the pioneer and precursor of Michael More's documentary Sicko recently released, but this one is based on a fictional situation. What is a father ready to do to enable his son to get a heart transplant? And what is the system able to do to prevent him from getting it because he does not have enough insurance coverage? The second question is easy to answer: nothing and the system will let the child die. No insurance coverage, no treatment. The first question is a lot more difficult to answer; the film goes very far in the fiction and yet it is absolutely believable. Yes a father is able to kidnap innocent people and medical personnel to impose a positive solution. Then the rest is pure luck, haphazard chance, good effective media, a lot of human feeling, a mistake done by the shoot-first-ask-questions-second chief of police in his four star uniform, and of course a lot of sympathy from the public which is perfectly understandable when you know 46 millions Americans have no health coverage at all and probably twenty more millions have a partial coverage, i.e. not full coverage or full coverage not all the time. The film is of course very effective emotionally, and it uses some short sequences from the news programs of the 1990s when Hillary Clinton was trying in the name of her husband to convince Congress to pass legislation on the subject and failed. I think even to kill yourself to provide your own son with a heart is an option that could be considered by some fathers. Of course the film did not emphasize the real negative sides of the problem, the greediness of some doctors, the total indifference of most administrative personnel, the brutality of the police in such cases who would consider a forceful solution before a peaceful one. But there must be some dream even when dealing with such a subject.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

This didn't work for me...
The story had it all going for it and Denzel’s acting was up to scratch as usual, however, for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, this film just didn't gel together. Characters seemed to change their mind for no obvious reason and others who were once adamant in their point of view were easily talked round with a few lines of moralistic gush. All slightly unrealistic. I think this film is aimed squarely at middle America i.e. extremely sentimental and proud people that are a bit simple. That said, my wife did enjoy it!!