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67It's hard to imagine how anyone could remain dry-eyed while watching the scene in which John Q. tries to cram in a lifetime of fatherhood advice in a goodbye speech to his son.
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38The movie goes awry from the opening shots.
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50A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.
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38The kind of movie Mad magazine prays for. It is so earnest, so overwrought and so wildly implausible that it begs to be parodied.
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50Waste in the health care system is deplorable, but waste on the movie screen isn't so great either.
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50It's as forgettable as they come.
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50The movie could have used a brain transplant. It doesn't explore injustice -- it just exploits it.
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50With its simplistic, didactic approach, the presence of a top-flight ensemble is the only thing separating John Q from your average TV movie of the week.
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40A coercive script by James Kearns, and some middling direction by Nick Cassavetes, can't rob the movie of an undeniable, headlong crowd-pleasing power.
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80An all-stops-out rabble-rouser that hurls a broadside at America's medical insurance crisis.
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20When emotion is called for, Cassavetes drags out every tear-jerking moment beyond the point of tolerability.
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50It's not honest, and it's certainly no solution.
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10Is it possible none of these actors read the script before they signed on? Were New Line executives perhaps too hung up on hobbits to notice how whacked out this movie is?
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50Not a movie but a live-action agitprop cartoon so shameless and coarse, it's almost funny.
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63This is an A-list cast toiling on a C-list screenplay.
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25Washington can't save a picture that spends so much time worrying about a heart that it loses its head.
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50Turns out to be hopelessly mediocre -- a poorly scripted, preachy fable that forgets about unfolding a coherent, believable story in its zeal to spread propaganda.
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10John Q. is as fake as that tear, an exploitative mess trying to pass as social activism.
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10Leaves you feeling as if you've been alternately milked and bitch-slapped. Its manipulation is so clumsy and obvious -- and, ultimately, it goes so far astray from its original guiding principles -- that it leaves you feeling dangled and dazed.
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50More hokey than heartfelt.
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50Washington's fire and righteous anger can only do so much, and the token grit amounts to a few grains of sand in the sentimental machinery.
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50Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.
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30Plays less like an exposé than a piece of exploitation, its clear divide between good and evil allowing no breathing room for real drama.
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50Like a tone-deaf singer at a benefit concert, John Q. is a bad movie appearing on behalf of a good cause.
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20So lacking in shame that it finally seems laughable.
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30Falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. John Q is a trashy, opportunistic piece of pop demagoguery. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]
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40The movie's tone and plot twists are so ludicrously overwrought that even Washington's admirably restrained performance -- can't rescue it from its own excesses.
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63One can excuse the movie's missteps and melodramatic moments in the greater interest of the strong statement it makes about our health care system.
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20A shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.
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20Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.
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0Every so often a movie transcends stupidity and soars into the empyrean of true idiocy. John Q. is such a movie.
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50Gripping, if manipulative and somewhat preposterous, drama.
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20This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.