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Movie Review: John Q
The plot is pretty simple. Denzel Washington plays John Quincy Archibald, a beleaguered working class guy in Chicago whose hours at the factory have been reduced and whose car has just been repo'd. He is catching guff about money from his wife (Denise Archibald), and the couple has a cute and loving kid Mike (Daniel Smith) who collapses during a baseball game.
It turns out that Mike needs a heart transplant, which the nasty hospital administrator (Anne Heche) informs John will cost $250,000, an operation his insurance policy doesn't come close to covering. The Archibald's sell of nearly everything they own to try and raise the money to pay the hospital and the greedy, uncaring surgeon (James Woods) and as Mike slips closer to dying, John snaps and takes over the hospital emergency room.
Robert Duvall plays Lt. Frank Grimes, an aging hostage negotiator undermined by his idiot boss (Ray Liotta). Almost everybody in this movie is a cliche -- the uncaring administrator, the political and bumbling police chief, the saintly, too-good-to-be true John Archibald, whose solution to his very valid complaints about the American health care system -- a solution much endorsed by the movie -- is to get a gun and take over the emergency room while patients bleed and give birth. Even while holding hostages at gunpoint, Washington's character is noble, even saintly. Washington is a great actor and he is a likeable hero here, but the plot just takes too many loopy twists and turns. Everyone in the film is either a cartoon villain or a noble lifesaver really to preach about the evils of HMOs at the drop of a gun.
The best parts of the movie, not surprisingly, occur when Duvall and Washington are sparking off one another. But unaccountably, there are so many silly plot contortions that the power of that great pairing is lost. Director Nick Cassavetes and writer James Kearns twist their movie into a pretzel trying to deal with all of the potential racial, class and political sensibilities. To balance all the evil doctors, there are some wonderful ones.
To avoid the appearance of hitting racial issues too hard, Archibald's friends are all white. In addition to the stupid police chief (is any authority figure in America ever competent in a Hollywood movie?), there's a woman-beater and an airhead, vain TV reporter.
I won't give away the ending, but it's fun watching the moviemakers wrestle with a dilemma of their own making. The movie seems to be saying that the best way to deal with your insurer is to get a weapon and take some hostages. Unlike the heroes of Dog Day Afternoon, perhaps the classic modern hostage movie, John Archibald is saintly and noble enough to run for President. So what becomes of our Dad/kidnapper? You'll have to see the movie to find out. It's entertaining, and it's almost sure to be a big hit. But even a superstar can't mask a silly story.
We live in a world (and country) where people can open your chest and give you a new heart if the original one isn't working. This isn't worth $250K? And if you can't afford it, it should be done for "free" (it's not ACTUALLY free, of course.)
Free hearts for everyone!
I'm tired of the friggin' preaching. I don't care how good the actors are.
Evil is the money of root.
That has more to do with the government's unwillingness to properly fund it, than whether or not it works. Every time there's a report about the state of Canadian healthcare, it seems to come from some right wing "thinktank"--why do they call them that?--that has a vested interest in bringing down the system, so they can put a for-profit system in its place.
Masankowski's recent report had connections with the Fraser Institute idiots, for instance. Roy Romanow's full report will be interesting once it's fully released. He has already said that the system is breaking down due to very insufficient government funding on all sides.
I fail to see how, in a system that has been pared to the bone and running probably about as efficiently as it's going to, how in the world introducing a profit motive, therefore slicing the pie ever further, is going to save money! Whatare they going to do, cut the salaries of the staff? This will just drive them south, as it has already done with many of the nurses.
I saw an interesting article in (I think) the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks ago. It suggested thatif Roy Romanow wanted to see what a for profit healthcare system looked like, he should look no further than the veterinary system thathe might use to take care of a family pet. The article went on to pint out many of the parallels between vetcare and our healthcare. I wish I could dig it up.
I don't think this movie "bashes" the HMOs.
First off the father in the movie had insurance (or so he thought). The insurance that he thought he had was supposed to cover this type of surgery. Come to find out that since his working hours at the factory had been cut from Full time to part time his insurance policy had changed as well (although he was not notified of this).
He was also not notified that his company decided to change insurance carriers.
So, it looks to me like his company is partly to blame for not informing about his insurance coverage.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The problem with the American health care system is simple:
The American Legal System
The legal system has made it so that doctors can never afford to be wrong and even if they are right, they better have excessive evidence that they are right. I'm a little surprise I didn't see any mention of lawyers in Katz's review, but in real life, more doctors and HMOs are held hostage by lawyers than by guns.
A poor guy's kid needs a heart transplant.
The heart transplant costs a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
The guy can't afford it.
The guy takes a gun and steals the procedure.
This makes him a hero?
...
I don't get it.
You know, in some countries, kids die because they can't afford food and clean water.
Oh, wait - this is an *American* kid - that makes this sort of thing OK - I see now...
Sort of makes me wish that they took the money that they used to make the movie and used it to buy food and heart transplants for people that need them rather than for mildly amusing a bunch of well-off people for 90 minutes.
(Yes, I believe that if you have the means to see this movie somehow, you are comparatively well-off, in the grand scheme of things.)
How about this - if you haven't seen the movie yet, *don't*.
Send $15 to UNICEF (or whoever) instead.
This movie strikes me as just another case of *talking* about doing good, rather than actually *doing* something good.
JMHO...
-- My Weblog.
I reemember while visting my aunt in Canada that my sister broke her arm while she was there - well long story short the doctor put her arm in a cast (she is just fine today). The entire trip cost 50$ - mind you we were american's - not canadians. I don't live there mind you - but I was impressed at the time. In the US my sister probably could have got the surgery quicker (and actually we didn't have to wait long) but it would have cost thousands of dollars. A good case in point was a former co-worker of mine who had a bicycle accident in front of the office - broke his leg. With no insurance he went to the hospital quite rapidly, but is faced with over 25,000 us dollars of hospital bills - and I'm not bs'ing you in the slightest.
I think its stupid - now that I lost my job a while back (a month now) I don't have insurance - a trip to get some medicine for a nasty sore throat cost me 75$ for the visit, which after the doctor came around 2~3 hours later lasted maybe 5 minutes and 25$ for the medicine - this is deadly for someone who has no addition income past unemployment (135$ per week)
And your own reviews are as welcome as mine.
;)
Katz's reviews are welcome?
Over 400 commentors can't be wrong.
I hope you're trolling, but I fear you might actually be serious.
I had a quick look at this Fraser Institute's web site. It seems to me that they support:
This sounds like a set of Your Rights Online articles!
It's easy to ignore the arguments that come from these groups when you characterize them as "right-wing" or "corporate apologists". My hometown newspaper likes to put Cato Institute articles in a special box marked "The Right Stuff - a forum for conservative opinion".
If someone's wrong, show me how they're wrong. Name-calling - i.e. "idiots" - doesn't prove a thing.
Your sig, however, is brilliant. I mean that. It says in seven words what I've been trying to tell politically-inclined people for years.
grep -ri 'should work'