Director Nick (son of John) Cassavetes kicks around health-care issues and medical ethics in addition to the Little Man hero, whose last name is actually Archibald and not Public: a devoted family man, a regular churchgoer, a hard worker, although the factory has started farming out jobs to Mexico and cutting back his hours to part-time, so that his insurance policy will no longer cover a life-saving heart transplant for his Little League son. (This is explained to him in the nasally tones of Anne Heche: "People get sick. They die. That's the way it goes.") He gets the bureaucratic runaround, sells off his possessions, raises approximately a tenth of the necessary quarter of a million, is given an emasculating earful from his wife -- what else is he to do but take over a wing of Hope Memorial with an unloaded gun? Even though we witness it with our own eyes, the entire scenario plays out like nothing so much as a defense attorney's final summation. Credence, accordingly, depends on susceptibility to hypnotism. Denzel Washington is such a sympathetic actor that it's almost an insult (to him, to us) to stack the deck so heavily in his favor. With Robert Duvall, James Woods, Kimberly Elise, and Ray Liotta. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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