Seeking Justice

Directed by Roger Donaldson, Seeking Justice follows Nicolas Cage’s Will Gerard as his life is thrown into turmoil after his wife (January Jones’ Laura) is raped by an unknown assailant – with Will’s desire for revenge eventually leading him to a mysterious figure known only as Simon (Guy Pearce). Simon, it’s quickly revealed, is the head of a clandestine network dedicated to seeking vigilante justice for clients on a quid pro quo basis, and Will, after agreeing to let Simon “take care” of his wife’s attacker, inevitably finds himself asked to perform a decidedly unsavory favor for Simon’s increasingly sinister organization. It’s an intriguing setup that is, at the outset, employed to perfectly watchable effect by filmmaker Roger Donaldson, as the director, working from a script by Robert Tannen, does a nice job of initially emphasizing the admittedly off-kilter situations that Cage’s character finds himself drawn into (ie Simon forces Will to jump through a series of oddball hoops in the execution of his payback assignment). It’s only as Seeking Justice rolls into its palpably padded-out midsection that one’s interest begins to flag, with the progressively less-than-engrossing atmosphere compounded by the inclusion of unreasonably preposterous plot developments (ie there reaches a point at which it becomes impossible to comfortably swallow the rampant silliness of the movie’s twists and turns). There is, as such, little doubt that the film’s action-oriented sequences are simply unable to pack the visceral punch that Donaldson has clearly intended, with the less-than-engrossing vibe compounded by an almost egregious emphasis on Will’s tedious investigation into Simon’s shady cabal. The end result is a hopelessly uneven thriller that just isn’t able to live up to its seemingly can’t-miss premise, with the film’s borderline passable atmosphere perpetuated by Cage and, especially, Pearce’s strong work.

** out of ****