Review of Seeking Justice (2011) by Jared F — 10 Aug 2012

Seeking Justice can be an effective thriller only if you're willing to turn off the logic center of your brain and agree not to ask questions afterwards. The screenwriter hopes that you have a very short attention span and hopefully couple that with short-term memory loss. For me, that's asking too much.

Nicholas Cage stars in one of his lesser performances as Will Gerard, a genial high school teacher with the perfect life, married to Laurie (January Jones), a gorgeous blonde who plays the cello in the symphony. They have one of those marriages that exist only in thrillers, the kind where every single detail of the marriage is perfect, there are no personal issues, no apparent history, and no arguments. Even when he starts acting bizarre their marriage is rock solid.

Will is an all-around good egg until his wife is raped and beaten one night on the way home. Distraught, Will tries to pull himself together only to find himself seated in the hospital waiting room next to a man who knows a little more about the crime than logic might suggest. The man's name is Simon (Guy Pierce) and he offers Will a proposition. He is part of an organization that can "take care" of the rapist if Will agrees to do him a favor later. Somehow Simon knows the rapist, his recent criminal activities and where he lives. We hope that how he got this information will come out later, but it doesn't.

Simon has a very bizarre method for getting the go-ahead from Will. He tells him to go to a certain cafeteria at a certain time and buy two candy bars from the vending machine (the candy is a fake brand because no respectable confectioner would be associated with this mess). That will be the signal. When Will gets there we are treated to one of the most cockamamie scenes in recent cinema history. Will stands before the machine with the money in his trembling hands while a nosy security guard tries to make small talk. Is the security guard part of the organization? We never find out.

Before Will can turn around, the rapist is dead and Will finds himself sent on several cloak and dagger missions to find criminals that have slipped through the cracks of the justice system. His first mission is to follow a woman and her children around the zoo and make a phone call if he spots a certain man following them. He takes him a while (far longer than it takes us) to figure out that the organization is asking him to participate in crimes that he is being set up for. The more he tries to get out, the more complicated the organization makes his life.

That sounds like a better thriller than we are given. Members of the organization are seen in fleeting glances and we are never completely sure just exactly how big it is. Agents are around every corner in places that they could not possibly know that Will is going to be. The organization must have limitless funds and limitless personnel to keep tabs on Will and on Laurie. When Will is set up for the murder of an apparent pedophile, he finds himself handcuffed in a room at the police station. The police psychiatrist takes off his cuffs and tells him to count to ten and walk out the door. Will is able to get out the door and down the street before the cops even know he's gone. Uh-huh.

Every moment of Seeking Justice is a contrivance, right down to a silly moment when Will gets away from his pursuers and runs into heavy traffic. You can count backwards from ten to the moment when one of the men chasing Will is squashed by an oncoming car. Looking back over the film and tallying up all the loose ends, you begin to identify.