2012's Seeking Justice Finds Nicolas Cage Tangling with a Sinister Secret Murder Revenge Conspiracy That (SPOILER) Turns Out to a Little Sketchy
In Seeking Justice Nicolas Cage frowns a lot.
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
The 2012 flop Seeking Justice is interesting to me, in a relatively uninteresting way, in that it seems to mark the inauspicious beginning of a very bleak period in Cage’s career.
The quality of the films and roles plummeted while the quantity of Cage’s vehicles soared proportionately. One of cinema’s true artists became a paycheck actor who prostituted his gifts in one interchangeable thriller after another to pay for ex-wives and castles and dinosaur bones and various other expenses.
With Seeking Justice Cage could at least delude himself into thinking that he was making a real movie and not mere RedBox fodder. The film was directed by Roger Donaldson, a New Zealand director whose filmography includes the iconic hits No Way Out, Cocktail and Species and co-stars Guy Pearce and Mad Men’s January Jones.
The lead role of an idealistic, passionate schoolteacher who falls into a shadowy world of murder, revenge and far-ranging conspiracies when he seeks justice following his wife’s sexual assault calls for Cage to be traumatized and overwhelmed, then filled with steely resolve.
But the truth is that Cage’s motivation here is the motivation of pretty much every hero in every action movie. The bad guys hurt someone close to him. So he gets revenge by defeating the villains.
That’s the premise of seemingly half the movies Cage made during this grim period in his career, where artistry and purity went out the window and pragmatism and compromise ruled.
The titles and plots of Cage’s movies began to blur together and overlap, becoming fuzzy and indistinct. Clint and I are covering Seeking Justice and Trespass for the next episode of Travolta/Cage and even though I have now seen Seeking Justice twice and Trespass three times I’m still not entirely sure that they’re not the same movie.
In Seeking Justice Cage plays Will Gerard, a total wife guy with regrettable facial hair and an unfortunate haircut who is perfectly content making a pittance teaching English if he can inspire students and have sex with beautiful musician wife Laura (January Jones).
Then one night the couple’s bliss ends violently when Laura is sexually assaulted. At the hospital a sinister figure played by an even more ominous than usual Guy Pearce makes him an offer he should DEFINITELY refuse.
The creepy stranger with the serial killer vibe tells our pacifist hero that he somehow already knows who raped his wife and also that he’s done it before and will do it again unless stopped.
Thankfully, this suspicious, suspiciously knowledgable man will do Will a solid by murdering his wife’s rapist and all Will has to do is agree to perform an unspecified favor for the massive sinister conspiracy he represents.
Maybe that’ll entail mailing a letter or making a phone call. Or maybe something a little more involved. Will just needs to agree to it without knowing anything more about the organization doing the killing or his own obligations until a time and date of the revenge conspiracy’s choosing.
At first Will says no, on account of the sinister revenge murder conspiracy being a little sketchy. Then he thinks about the crime for ten to fifteen seconds and relents.
Will clearly thinks that this is a sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy that can be trusted and will always be honest with him. I honestly find that a little naive. I’m not sure ANY secret murder revenge conspiracy can be trusted, let alone this one.
dignity, always dignity.
Will feels differently. He performs two minor errands and understandably thinks that he can leave the sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy in good standing. He’s wrong! The sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy actually turns out to be EVIL!
Oh sure, it might have started innocently enough, with the conspiracy killing the scum of the earth in a Strangers on a Train/Rube Goldberg long game. But eventually they went too far and just started killing whoever they pleased.
The sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy next calls upon Will to bump off someone they claim is a child molester. He says no forcefully but politely but they keep playing the whole “We killed your wife’s rapist and also are a shadowy organization with seemingly limitless resources who think nothing of murdering our enemies” card so he has to go along with their plan.
the many scowls of Nicolas Cage!
When the man ends up dead Will is framed for the crime. Our hero discovers the man he was sent to kill was a crusading journalist out to expose the sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy rather than a kiddy-diddler.
Our hero uses the muckraking reporter’s information to turn the tables on the sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy and extricate himself from it.
The emotional core of Seeking Justice is similar to that of Death Wish: a peaceful man’s wife is raped and he seeks revenge on the people responsible. Seeking Justice’s counter-productive twist is to take a very simple, ubiquitous premise and make it annoyingly, unnecessarily complicated and convoluted.
That is not an improvement. Poor Cage spends the film being jerked around by the sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy, the screenplay and the cruel, sadistically arbitrary hand of fate.
Laura’s assault should be the traumatic heart of the film, the awful catalyst for all of the furious if meaningless exertion to come. But because Laura is so thinly drawn and Jones’ performance is so vacant and wan it never registers as anything more than a cynical plot point.
The film’s emotions are ersatz, artificial. There’s nothing organic about them. They exist instead to keep the movie’s plot sputtering along.
Cage is lost. For neither the first time nor the last time he is defeated by an empty role that doesn’t give him anything to do, that strands him in the thankless part of a generic hero who instantly develops the formidable skill set to more or less single-handedly defeat a sinister secret murder revenge conspiracy even though the screenplay establishes that his strengths should be grammar and punctuation.
Seeking Justice has an agreeably loony premise but frustratingly workmanlike execution. It’s worse than bad: it’s boring.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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