Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time.
Cultural infamy/curiosity factor: Nicolas Cage stars in a lot of movies, and it can be difficult to sort out the awesome batshit (Drive Angry) from the simply shit-shit (Ghost Rider). Which of his starring roles will feature his true animal spirit, and which will find his insanity dampened by not-quite-bad-enough material? Based on the cover of the DVD and the relatively straightforward-sounding plot (“a happily married family man whose quiet life is turned upside down when his wife is brutally attacked”), Seeking Justice sounds like it might end up in the snooze pile. But with Cage movies, you really never know until you experience it firsthand.
Even the often-helpful Rotten Tomatoes meter is massively unreliable when it comes to Cage: His magnetism must somehow throw off the calculating devices. The absolutely essential Wicker Man remake sits at a lowly 15 percent, and the decent-but-forgettable Matchstick Men is at 82 percent. Seeking Justice currently has a 25 percent rating, with the editorial warning that it’s “nothing more than a typical potboiler.” Our own Nathan Rabin gave it a D-, so I asked him directly what saved it from the worst possible grade. He replied:
It definitely fits my primary requirement for giving an F: It was so fucking awful, it actually made me angry. I was borderline-apoplectic watching the entire film, yet I think I refrained from giving it an F (instead choosing what our commenters not-inaccurately refer to as ‘the gentleman’s F’) because it had all the elements for being a truly transcendent exercise in Nicolas Cage craziness. First and foremost, it had Cage, with preposterous facial hair and a predilection for quoting Shakespeare. But it also has what should be an agreeably loopy premise involving a massive conspiracy that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, clumsily integrated New Orleans locations (all that’s missing is Justin Wilson shouting ‘I guarontee!’), offensively lazy performances by January Jones and Guy Pearce, and even a climax that takes place in an abandoned mall.
That reply, I will admit, actually made me more excited to watch Seeking Justice.
The best quote they could come up with for the DVD’s back cover (“Nicolas Cage and January Jones are a dynamite fit”) is from a website called moviesharkdeblore.com, which rolls right off the tongue. (The site’s reviews also appears to be written solely for the purpose of generating blurbs for DVD covers.) But I pressed on, because even in the worst Cage movie, there are generally at least a few moments in which the man himself emerges from the character, transcending celluloid and all actors before him. This is not necessarily a good thing—I’m not a slavish Cage fan. But it is almost always something to behold. Oh, and I’m desperately hoping there’s a character named “Justice” who needs to be found. And one more thing: The director, Roger Donaldson, also directed the Tom Cruise-is-a-bartender flick Cocktail and the pretty-decent Jason Statham heist movie The Bank Job.
The viewing experience: Seeking Justice wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, but I expected it to be an unforgiveable, boring piece of garbage. I can’t say much of it was enjoyable, but because it was so dull, it actually gave me time—even while taking notes—to build a better version of it in my head. The chief problem with Seeking Justice is that the character played by Nicolas Cage—pretty much the reason we’re all here—is completely inessential and uninteresting to the larger story. There is literally no reason for him to exist. Let me explain.
Nicolas Cage and January Jones are a happy couple. They nuzzle. He buys her a necklace. He is an inner-city high-school teacher, she plays cello professionally. One night, as Cage plays chess with his friend Harold Perrineau—Walt’s dad from Lost, a.k.a. the wheelchair narrator from Oz—Jones is raped, but kinda offscreen, because this isn’t one of those kinds of movies. While in the hospital waiting room, Cage is approached by bald Guy Pearce, who says he knows who raped Cage’s wife, and he’ll have the guy killed immediately—if Cage agrees to a simple favor somewhere down the line, like maybe making a phone call or something else innocuous. Cage says no way, then has a flashback to five minutes beforehand when he saw his bruised wife, then says yes.
Without boring you with all the details, Pearce starts to ask Cage to do various things to pay back the debt, up to and including murdering a pedophile by pushing him off a bridge. Cage is a nice guy, so he has some problems with this, and eventually he’s being pursued by Pearce’s well-staffed, well-trained, deeply connected organization, which decides to kill him. And there’s the problem: Seeking Justice hinges on the idea that Pearce’s secret organization somehow needs ordinary schlubs like Cage to do its dirty work—and that for some reason, its masterminds believe those schlubs will do a better job than the organization’s own professional killers.