But just as the Republic seems to have been redeemed, along comes John Q. Bearing the startling news that Americans are fed up with HMOs, this picture offers compelling evidence that the new Message Movie genre is already sliding into decadence. If John Q proves anything, it's that we might have underestimated the subtle artistry of On the Beach and Hewitt's Just Different.

This is a shame, because for the first 15 minutes or so it almost looks like the movie might be a deft piece of agitprop. The topic of today's sermon is America's Health Care Crisis, and as the movie's title suggests, the plight of the Common Man will be pounded home in terms that would make a Havana censor blush. Though ostensibly set in the present day, John Q exists in a kind of extended movie 1975 where cars are always being repossessed, the factory is perpetually shutting down, hospitals are larded with religious statuary, an honest working man can't get a break, and even the telephones are rotary. The movie's conflict - in which modern everyman Denzel Washington gets cut off by his insurance carrier just as his 10-year-old son needs a heart transplant - should be an audience grabber; and the spectacle of Washington - an actor in constant danger of vanishing into a prison of boring rectitude - pleading and sweating for the attention of faceless bureaucrats is as gripping as the film gets. Wan succubus Anne Heche, a performer audiences instinctively loathe, is an inspired choice as a self-satisfied hospital suit. When the same doctor who won't treat Denzel's son is seen joking with a rich heart-transplant recipient who wears an ascot, it appears for a moment that we're going to witness class warfare of inspired shamelessness.

The great generation of socially conscious filmmakers would have known how to milk this material for head-busting tension. In order to convince audiences that nuclear war was bad, Sidney Lumet built Fail Safe's tension out of an interlocking set of closely-observed details that combine to go wrong. John Q has the potential for an even more Kafkaesque situation - a father working through a baroque structure of HMOs, customer service drones, local "medical group" middlemen and Human Resources pukes to save a son who is as cute as Webster. Unfortunately, writer James Kearns, who cut his teeth with scripts for Highway to Heaven and Jake and the Fatman, either doesn't trust the audience to stay with the frustration or isn't aware of how richly complicated the health care system can be. The struggle for affordable health care, which could be stretched through half the movie's length, is dispatched in a quick montage.

Instead, the picture shifts into a hostage drama of white-knuckle boredom. All the clichés of hostage movies - the SWAT sniper crawling through an air duct, the crowd of unruly rubberneckers who cheer for the hostage taker (with all the invidious comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon that invites), the meretricious newsman who grandly announces "This is my White Bronco" - get trotted out, and the burden of broadcasting the picture's propaganda falls exclusively on a series of monologues, dialogues and pettifogs. At one point, as soon as it's clear that nothing very big is going to happen in the standoff, the hostage taker and his charges settle in for a bull session about the ills of the contemporary health care system that seems like something you might catch on C-Span on a Saturday afternoon. When a movie ends by recapping its themes in clips from Politically Incorrect, something's gone seriously wrong.

But John Q's technical ineptitude points to a greater crisis in the socially conscious movie genre. One of the most durable traits of the well-heeled left is the conviction that all Americans would wise up and become leftists if only PACs, corporate flacks and other captains of consciousness had not rendered "dissent" impossible. Along these lines, John Q functions as wish fulfillment, with an emergency room hostage crisis sparking a national debate on the previously unknown topic of health care. According to the press notes, the script was written in 1993, and you might have guessed that from its apparent belief that everybody in America is waiting around for Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner to make us well again. Given the low regard HMOs are held in from coast to coast, you'd think a movie wouldn't have to work very hard to get viewers booing and hissing at the uncaring medical industry. But the makers of John Q lack all confidence in the popularity of their themes. I suspect that if they had made Norma Rae, they'd have given Ron Liebman a half hour or so to explain patiently that unions are collective bargaining organizations that seek to improve conditions for workers. Pictures like John Q and The Hurricane highlight their issues not as fodder for stirring speeches or rabble-rousing drama, but because their makers seem to believe the audience needs remedial education.

This lowering of the genre's temperature is tragic not just for the valuable lessons message movies impart. (After all, if it hadn't been for The Day After, Americans would be going around believing that nuclear wars are way cool and should be waged as often as possible.) But while they may not have been very good even at the time, movies like The Defiant Ones or In the Heat of the Night at least stand as collectible pieces of crude popular art that, like the songs of the labor movement, can be appreciated no matter how indifferent you may be to their politics. For anybody who finds Hollywood dilettantes a particularly ill-chosen group of spokespeople for "Working Families," oppressed minorities and other huddled masses, the apparent resurgence of the consciousness-raising movie is unwelcome enough. In such a lazy and artless form, however, the genre is unbearable. Ahead of us stretches a long, dusty road of movies that strongly resemble The West Wing's very special terrorism-is-wrong episode. The Message Movie is back, and the message is simpler than ever. The only question is whether audiences will be slow enough to follow along.