John Q Movie Critique - Essay Example

Story Outline: John Q is a film where the protagonist John Quincy Adams is a father whose son collapses during a baseball game. When he is taken to the hospital and tests are carried out, John Q discovers that his son has an enlarged heart and needs a heart transplant operation that will cost $250,000, but his health insurance will not cover it. The family then starts working hard organizing yard sales and working overtime in order to try and raise the money so that the operation can take place, but the hospital takes the decision instead to release his son. The desperate father is left with no other alternative but to walk into the hospital and start the hostage situation. He holds several people hostage inside the hospital and his demand is that his son’s name should be placed on the donor recipient list as soon as possible. The hostage negotiator steps back for a while so that John can cool off and in the meantime, John interacts with some of the hostages. One of them is a young pregnant couple Miriam and Steve, who are anxious about their baby and hope it is healthy. Another couple are Julie and Mitch and it is evident to everyone that Julie’s broken arm is not the result of the car accident as the couple claim but rather the result of Mitch beating her up. John agrees with the hostage negotiator to release a few hostage if his son’s name is place don the recipient list within an hour. In a quarrel that breaks out between Mitch and Steve as to who is to be released, Mitch throws a racial slur at Steve and the two men begin to fight. When John Q intervenes to try and pull them apart, Mitch sprays pepper spray on him and also stabs him with a scalpel. As they wrestle with each other, John Q’s gun is knocked away and Mitch exhorts his girlfriend to pick it up and hand it him. She however sprays him with pepper spray instead, kicking him viciously to repay him for his beating her. John manages to grab the handcuffs from a guard and lock Mitch to the radiator. He releases Steve, Miriam and another pregnant hostage named Rosa. In the meantime however, despite the negotiator’s efforts, the police inspector decides to overrule him and intervene in the matter. A SWAT team is enlisted to send a sniper into the building. Meanwhile, John Q has a conversation with his wife and son, assuring them that all will be well, quite unaware that his emotional, personal conversation is also being picked up by the TV cameras and mikes. In the midst of this, the sniper shoots John and wounds him in the leg, but John grabs him, pulls him down and beats him. Then John Q takes a bold step and moves outside, using the sniper’s body as a shield, demanding that his son should be brought immediately to the emergency room where the surgeons were to perform the procedure to save his life. The negotiator tries to explain to John Q that he can do no more for his son, who has already been placed on the high priority list and already, his actions will lead to certain imprisonment, with further defiance perhaps resulting in death. But the police give in to his insistent demand in exchange for the SWAT prisoner and John’s son is wheeled into the emergency room. It is then that John Q reveals that he intends to commit suicide so that his heart can be donated to his son so that he can live. Moreover, his gun has been unloaded all this while, but in the emergency room, he loads a single bullet and pulls it. But the safety catch was on. As John points the gun at his head again, his wife rushes in with the news that a woman has been in an accident and her blood type is the same as their son’s. Michael is given the operation and John lets the hostages go free. He is taken into custody by the police and found guilty on a kidnapping charge for which he has to serve two to five years in prison. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale is based upon the premise that the good or bad events that occur in a person’s life can contribute to an increase in stress levels and make that person more susceptible to illness as well as to mental health problems.(Holmes and Rahe 1967). This scale contains 43 different items, each of which is accorded a score, depending upon whether it has taken place in the last twelve months, and adding them all up allows an evaluation of what levels of stress a person is suffering from. In John Q’s life, there are several stress inducing elements. In the first place, learning that his son needs a transplant is itself a stress inducing factor and gets a score of 44 on the scale. Another big element of stress in his life is the fact that he is jailed at the end of the story and this stress causing event has a score of 63. His financial situation changes as he is stressed out at the prospect of having to raise 250,000 dollars in a short time which rates a score of 38. In stepping into hostage activity which is a potentially criminal line of work with all its attendant tensions, he moves into another line of work which gets a score of 36 and there is a change in the family’s living conditions as they are forced to cope with the crisis generated by the ill health and near death state of their son Michael, which gathers a score of 25. During the hostage situation, he gets into fights - he is stabbed by Mitch with a scalpel and shot in the leg by a sniper, so the personal injury stress causing score is 53. Further, during the entire hostage episode, there is a change in his social activities and the kinds of people he mixes with which itself generates stress to a score of 18, a change in his sleeping habits since he needs to be constantly vigilant and is in a perpetual state of tension which generates a stress score of 16, apart from the minor violations of laws which he initiates at first which gets a score of 11. Totalling up all of these scores, John Q’s stress factor, the score is 304 on the stress readjustment scale, which is equivalent to major stress. The health situation of his generates a crisis in his life, not only in terms of the prospect of losing his son, but also in his financial conditions, his job, his working conditions, the company he keeps and a conflict with the law which results in his imprisonment, as well as the prospect of his own death in order to save his son. All of these add up to major stress. John copes with most of the stress by reacting with anger and emotion. He reacts by deciding that if he cannot lawfully achieve the operation of his son, he will manage it unlawfully. Yet throughout, he maintains his ethics and his morals in that he does not kill anyone but only wounds them, and finally reveals that his gun had no bullets in it. When no donor can be found for his son, he copes with the threat of losing his son by readying himself to provide the heart his son needs. His coping strategies are mainly one of action born out of frustration, and the occasional release of his emotions through his physical fights also helps him to keep going. References: * Holmes, T.H. and Rahe, R.H. 1967. “The Social readjustment Rating Scale”, Journal of Psychosomatic research, 11 :213-218 * John Q – Film. Read More