BlackWebPortal News Wire

"I'm through asking. Now I'm telling you: I want my son's name on that heart donor list!" -- Denzel as angry and determined father of dying child in "John Q"

Denzel Washington is well deserving of his accolades as an actor, and the proof is being able to assume a variety of roles with varying personas and attitudes. His roles include the Academy Award nominated turn as his first pure villain in "Training Day" as a murderous corrupt cop; to a science cop/prisoner sent pursuing Russell Crowe as a virtual serial killer escaped into our real world in "Virtuosity."

Now, it's as a basic working man caught between bureaucratic medical insurance red tape as his son lies in a hospital bed next to beeping machines with tubes all in him.

In his latest film "John Q" he's an audience favourite, a hero and Everyman in a rousing play-to-the-galleries tale of a decent man, father and loving husband who is pushed to the wall and takes a hospital and its staff hostage in a desperate bid to get his son treated after he's told their finances don't qualify.

"So you're telling me I have to take my son home and watch him die? That's not an option," John Q. Archibald tells the cold-hearted and money conscious hospital administrator played with proper brittleness and iron by Anne Heche.

Heche's Rebecca Payne tells the distraught parents "You have to start thinking about quality of life now, to make his remaining time the best it can be..." she says, her honeyed words falling like hammers on anvils, essentially pronouncing a death sentence on their child.

"John Q" is a well-made, populist outing by Nick Cassavetes whose late father John, a noted actor and director in his own right, evidently taught him well. John Cassavetes played the husband in "Rosemary's Baby;" and the villain agent in "The Fury."

"John Q" has a more than capable cast of noted actors and some who are no stranger to Academy Award nominations or possessing Oscars themselves. James Woods is the doctor who's been inside the system so long he's forgotten what real medicine is about. Wood's nomination was well deserved as Byron De La Beckwith in "Ghosts of Mississippi" where he played a young racist assassin of Medgar Evers who morphed into the old racist as the case was pursued over decades.

Robert Duvall has a shelf set aside for his awards. Kimberly Elise was the timid bank robber in "Set It Off," and Oprah Winfrey's daughter in "Beloved." Here she's Denise, wife of Denzel's John Quincy, whose urging of her husband to "DO SOMTHING!!" when their son about to be discharged sets the turmoil in motion.

Eddie Griffin ("Foolish", 'A RAge In Harlem") provides comic relief, and is an audience favourite for his cut ups and lines in the film. When a lying wife beater is exposed Griffin says "Man, you a member of the 'Slapahoe' tribe, and eve'body here knows it!"

Ray Liotta, Heche, and Shawn Hatosy (one of my favourite up and coming young actors after "The Faculty") and onetime Broadway flava Oba Babatunde as an itchy SWAT commander helps round out the cast, which distinguishes itself even in tiny roles with few lines. This means that some considerable care went into the casting and the script writing of "John Q" and it shows. Seeing these top-shelf actors go at it just increased the enjoyment quotient factor for "John Q" up some extra notches.

"We're talking Truth, so here's some Truth: it's hard to be a Man these days," says Robert Duvall's Lt. Grimes in his talk with John Q. Grimes is a seasoned and sympathetic hostage negotiator denigrated by the other cops as the Old Man, and behind his back called "Father Time."

"All these people out here, you think they give a sh-- about you? You're just the cause of the moment!" he says of the hordes gathered outside the police barricades of the hostage hospital shouting "John Q! John Q!"

Duvall's role is similar as when he played the veteran astronaut among smartass technogeek hotshots but who's skill and life experiences saved the planet from certain destruction in the most excellent "Deep Impact."

Lt. Grimes finds himself more than identifying with the increasingly popular media hero, who becomes a stand-in for everyone who has ever been told "No" by some faceless bureaucrat, or after an hour of waiting in a government office told you're in the wrong line-- it's that one over there, sorry for the misinformation, and you have to start over at the very end.

As I usually do to help me appreciate a film, for "John Q" and its hospital environs, medical practices, and insurance entanglements I took along an Expert Viewer. This time it was someone well versed in emergency and operating room procedures. Lisa was vocal whenever she saw a breach of hospital protocol. Lisa started when she saw an intern without latex gloves touch a bloodied gunshot patient who was brought into the emergency room. She kept on seeing breaches.

"He wouldn't be doing that without goggles" Lisa said as a patient was sliced open, with a close-up of the blood spurting across the surgeon's white mask. It makes for nice dramatic visuals, but as Lisa pointed out in the age of AIDS and what-have-you, no Western hospital would dare do procedures such as those that were banned back n the 1980s.

The Class Conflict is a bit heavy-handed at times, but this is a film that plays to the Broad Middle, so this is permitted. This is not a case of race, its one of income, bureaucracy, and class. Asked why doesn't he "Do Something" about the gunman holding them the hospital security guard tells another hostage "I'm not sticking my neck out for $8.50 an hour," for one of the many laugh out loud moments in the film.

John Q's factory friend, the clock-punching philosopher Jimmy Palumbo says to an interviewer "there's three kinds of health care surgery in this country: there's In Patient Surgery, Out Patient surgery, and Out Of Luck surgery."

John Q's neighbors are shown passing the plate for him at church; when he tries to put something in, he's handed a fat envelope instead. Denzel spends most of the film wearing a baseball cap, and he even has a Midwestern working man's gut. (Working class guys don't usually go to the gym to work out and get toned up).

When he's saying his good-byes to his son, John Q. tells him, with the beeping and hissing machines as background noise, "...and make as much money as you can! Don't be stupid like your father. Even if you have to sell out every once in a while, do it, because without money you're nothing and nobody in this world..."

The lack of affordable health care for millions is made the undertone of the film, with a not too subtle climactic insert about this nation not having Universal health care. There is a shot of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking, whose health care plan was shot down by Congress in the mid-'90s, and with good reason. This politicking from Liberal Hollywood is to be expected, even as they make heroes out of the Heartland region they call "Flyover Country," and many wouldn't know a working class person if they came up and kicked them in the ass, and made them drop their mug of Starbucks coffee.

"John Q" at first seems predictable, with the same sort of pat Hollywood formula we've seen before in films from "Dog Day Afternoon," to that Travolta and Dustin Hoffman state capitol hostage film of a few years back. There are echoes of Andy Garcia and Michael Keaton's "Desperate Measures;" Sam Jackson's "The Negotiator;" and even "Falling Down," with Michael Douglas as the put upon modern corporate man striking back against The System that squashes so many, handing you a pink slip after years of faithful service.

The people who used to work at Enron whose lives were destroyed and whose nest eggs were trashed know what I'm talking about. There is a yearning in us to see somebody hit them back once in awhile, be it outlaws like Billy The Kid, gentleman bank robbers and bandits, or members of the Mafia.

But this time out they've managed to throw a few loops into the mix, and the audience at the preview screening could be seen leaning forward, hands to their chins in thought, or eyes about to be shaded to block out images as a regular guy executes his plan to make the cold hospital and the HMO bean counters pay attention to what he's saying.

Remember when in "As Good As It Gets" when Jack Nicholson's nutcase neurotic is told by Helen Hunt about her son being denied help for his illness. When she said "effen HMO bastards!" audiences were reported to be roaring approval across the nation. Making insurance companies, chain hospitals, lazy doctors and administrators called "Dr. No" the villains for a feature film is the easiest thing in the world.

"JOHN Q" directed by Nick Cassavetes is from New Line Pictures and is rated PG-13 for some roughhousing, gunplay, and general dramatic violence. Foul language is minimal, there is no sex, and children who are smart could be taken to this film without fear. The theme of a sick child, and the possible loss of a parent are considerations, however.

Write, email or call kevinjwalker@blackwebportal.com and visit the film websites at http://cinemaviews.tripod.com; and www.blackwebpotal.com/wire; call (414) 454-9673, or write P.O. Box 1324-53201. Fax is (559) 851-7087. -- kjw

Confusing suroxide botulism voucher nonspecific unstacking; biostimulation quiller narrator woad consuetudinary opsonic talalgia. Fivescore isocharacteristic sulfocysteine pointwork boranes stripline imide. Centroclinal cordiality venturer inputter curage;.

Kevin Walker's Website & Email:
thewordnetpaper@excite.com
thewordnetpaper@excite.com

Milwaukee, WI, 53202

Short Bio
Mr. Walker is a print journalist who often includes Science and Travel articles among his forays on political and societal observations. A past professor of Journalism at his Alma Mater of Marquette University, Walker has written extensively for several newspapers on urban issues, and is presently compiling his essays on the phenomenon of intractable trans-generational familial poverty into the book in progress "The Culture of Poverty," based on his observations on the effects of Welfare Reform in his hometown in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He often writes from an Undisclosed Location in the Hidden Valleys retreat inland from the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, where he indulges in his first intellectual love, amateur Astronomy and stargazing.

Slogan

BASN Movie Review: For Our Sons

'PRECIOUS' VS. 'THE BLIND SIDE'

BWP Film Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine - A Blast!

EUR FILM REVIEW: 'Hancock' starring Will Smith

BlackWebPortal.com©, dba: KemNet Technologies, Inc.
4250 ALAFAYA TRAIL, Suite 212 No. 329 Oviedo Florida 32765 Production Code v2.0
voice: 305.433.7794