#64: Seeking Justice/Justice (2011)

My name is Ed and in less than 3 months time, I will have seen every film Nicolas Cage has ever made. I’ve been watching two a week, each time choosing 6 numbers based on that film and using them to play the UK National Lottery, which I intend to win, using the mystical energy channeled by Nicolas Cage performances.

There’s a thing they have in Hollywood where development executives vote on their favourite unproduced scripts and the ‘best’ ones make it onto something called The Black List. While some entries on the list end up becoming properly good films, even the people who compile the list admit on their website that it represents the ‘most liked’ scripts rather than the best ones: it has included such classics as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, and also this piece of shit.

Seeking Justice, renamed Justice in the UK (maybe they were trying to hide all the bad reviews) was originally known as The Hungry Rabbit Jumps for reasons that make only slightly less sense once you’ve sat through the film. It stars Nicolas Cage as a good and honest school teacher who changes inner city kids’ lives by patiently explaining to them that writing poems is better than punching people in the face (this literally happens), until his wife, January Jones from Mad Men, is brutally raped.

At which points he enlists the services of a group of mysterious vigilante men to see some Real Justice like you don’t get now because of political correctness. But, oh no, now King Vigilante Guy Pearce wants a favour in return. A MURDER favour. Of murder.

This is pretty questionable stuff, on a number of levels. I mean: at last a film that deals with the true victims of rape, the husbands! All things considered, it wouldn’t make this much less awful, but you really wouldn’t need to rewrite much of this it make January Jones the protagonist. Plus you wouldn’t have to look at Nicolas Cage’s stupid goatee quite so much.

Then there’s the uncomfortable feeling that the film expects us to at least pause to consider whether the world wouldn’t, in fact, be better with some Real Justice from Real Men. I suppose one, could, if feeling extremely charitable, read some Fight Club-style satire of toxic masculinity into this. But you could also spend that time thinking about literally anything else at all that isn’t this shitty movie.

Because even if you look past this stuff, Seeking Justice is structurally doomed: it is a thriller with no twists. Once the premise is established, everything plays out almost exactly as you would think it would, assuming you’re not watching it thinking, “Promising a favour to the insane vigilantes who are going to murder the guy who raped your wife sounds like an extremely good idea with no possible negative consequences!” There’s basically nowhere for it to go beyond endless running about and shouting.

I mean, running about and shouting can be passably entertaining, especially if Nicolas Cage is in full Nicolas Cage mode, but here he just looks bored. If there was ever a film the demanded a ‘Cage finally loses his shit’ sequence it was this, but Seeking Justice is not prepared to wink at its own ludicrous premise. There’s no hope of actually saving this, so escalate! Make it turn out the whole thing was planned by the President of the USA or that January Jones is a hologram from space. But no, the film just sits there, stony-faced, as though that’ll make it look less stupid. It doesn’t.

Still. There’s a bit with a monster truck show (even if they mainly point the camera at Guy Pearce’s dumb face instead of the monster trucks). Nicolas Cage wears a sparkly silver mask at the beginning. And Harold Perrineau from Lost is in it, so in a pinch you can entertain yourself for literally seconds at a time by shouting “WAAAAALT!” every time he’s onscreen.

THE NUMBERS

1 — The secret code to indicate that Nicolas Cage wants Guy Pearce to murder the rapist is to buy two chocolate bars. Each of them costs him $1. They’re ‘Forever Bars’ which is probably a clever satire about prisons or something.

3 — January Jones is taken to Intensive Care Unit 3.

7 — Nic Cage is told to catch the number 7 bus to school, then get off the bus and murder a dude. He doesn’t murder him but the dude dies in an accident anyway. Oops!

22 — The dude Nic Cage is supposed to murder keeps a boat in a storage unit numbered 22.

37 — The dude Nic Cage is supposed to murder is 37 years old, according to his obituary. He is a journalist, so on some level probably deserved to accidentally fall off a bridge onto motorway.

55 — The package containing Nic Cage’s murder instructions includes a post-it note with the number 504–555–0189 written on it. Phone numbers with the 555 prefix aren’t regularly given out in America so are used in movies to avoid accidentally showing someone’s real phone number and having stupid idiots who watch bad Nic Cage movies ring them to complain or whatever.

THE RESULT

1 number. Where’s my justice for watching this cack, eh readers?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Nic Cage returns to a franchise for only the second time in his career, for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance