A film that will tug at one’s heartstrings

It takes on the two-tiered health-care system and for-profit health insurance companies. Among its shocking revelations are the fact that as many as 50 million Americans do not even have health insurance and millions more have inadequate coverage.

So what happens when one of these people is faced with a health crisis? Say, a child (Daniel E. Smith) needs a heart transplant within months or he’ll die? That’s what happens to factory worker John Quincy Archibald (Denzel Washington).

John’s hours at work have been drastically cut back and his wife Denise (Kimberly Elise) has to beg for extra hours at her cashier job.

Without any warning, their son collapses at a baseball game and is discovered to have a congenital disease that has ballooned his heart to a critical degree.

It’s only then that John discovers that his health coverage was placed at a lower tier when his hours were cut back. His insurance company will not fund the $200,000 procedure. The heart surgeon Dr. Turner (James Woods) is willing to do the operation but the callous hospital administrator Rebecca Pyne (Anne Heche) insists on an up-front payment or she’s sending the child home to die.

His brief hospital stay has already cost $30,000 and escalates by the day.

John tries to get the insurance company, city agencies and even the press on his son’s side but no one will listen to this ordinary John Q. John feels he has no choice but to take Dr. Turner and the hospital emergency room hostage and demand that his son be given the operation.

Within hours, Grimes (Robert Duvall), the city’s chief hostage negotiator, is trying to reason not only with John but with his hot-headed superior, chief Monroe (Ray Liotta), who wants this embarrassment to go away quickly – and at any cost.

Washington is a most sympathetic and charismatic actor. Woods, Liotta and Heche make great villains. They can sleepwalk and still play smarmy bureaucrats that will have the audience cheering John Q while booing and hissing them. The film’s most notorious creep is the television news anchor whose only concern is ratings.

There’s a semblance of balance with Duvall, whose Grimes is at least level-headed.

What John Q does is understandable but it’s wrong. If everyone who had legitimate squabbles with health care took doctors hostage, chaos would reign.

While we’re talking emergency rooms, you know this film is not taking place in Alberta. When the gun-wielding John barges in with Dr. Turner in tow there are 14 people including a security guard, nurse and receptionist in the emergency room.

That’s about as realistic as what happens over the next hour as John, director Nick Cassavetes and writer James Kearns try to get themselves out of an improbable and virtually impossible situation.

John Q is a real audience-pleaser that will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever waited in a doctor’s office, emergency room, hospital bed or insurance company office.

From New Line Cinema, the film John Q opened at No1. in the US box office. (This film is rated AA)