Skip to footer

Seeking Justice: movie review

( R ) ( Monitor Movie Guide )

Plot holes in 'Seeking Justice' make the movie simply a less smart version of the usual vigilante justice genre.

|
Luca Bruno/STF/AP
'Seeking Justice' star Nicolas Cage plays a mild-mannered teacher who is drawn into an agreement with a mysterious man.
  • By Peter Rainer Film critic

Nicolas Cage plays Will, a mild-mannered schoolteacher whose runway model-looking wife (January Jones) is attacked and raped in Roger Donaldson’s “Seeking Justice,” a dumb-dumb variant on the “Death Wish” vigilante justice genre. Highly distraught, Will is approached in the hospital by a shadowy figure, Simon (Guy Pearce), who makes him an offer he could easily refuse, but doesn’t. For a favor to be named later, Simon will have the rapist murdered. By agreeing to this, Will, of course, lets himself in for a heap of trouble. If he didn’t there wouldn’t be a movie.

The idiocy of the film’s conceit is that Simon recruits innocents like Will to carry out these vigilante killings – the killings our liberal legal system won’t sanction. Why would Simon bring these bumbling amateurs into the fray when he and his minions could obviously do a better job? Again, if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie. Grade: C- (Rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality.)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Seeking Justice: movie review
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2012/0316/Seeking-Justice-movie-review
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe