Directed by: Roger Donaldson
Written by: Robert Tannen and Todd Hickey
Featuring: Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce, Harold Perrineau, Jennifer Carpenter, January Jones
In the canon of New Orleans crime film, Seeking Justice is the bad night on Bourbon Street.
It starts off promising. Not golden, but you get your hopes up. Director Roger Donaldson seems to be phoning it in a little, sure. Nic Cage is so energetic, though. There’s jazz and foreshadowing and Walt’s dad from LOST — this could turn out well.
Midway through Seeking Justice, you’re having a good time thanks to cheap swill. You know that the editing, the acting and the dialogue could be better, but fuck it — you’re here for a good time. By now, the storyline of a shadowy conspiracy of Big Easy vigilantes has flowered into car chases, a mystery and nifty DIY tricks to evade the law. The beast in your brain tells you to shut off the inner critic and just sip on the adrenaline rush.
But by the last act of Seeking Justice, you can’t hold back that sour rush in your gut. Everything is so damn foggy. The violence and dialogue have degenerated into a nonsensical shouting match. Balance gone, logic a distant memory, you can no longer relate on a human level to events. You just can’t hang.
At last, the credits roll. Relief infuses you. Remorse sinks in. And all you’re left with is a stale taste miring your memory, trying to piece together what just happened and instead only feeling sullied to have experienced it.
Where did it go wrong?
I’ll count the ways. There are many. It takes way more than three strikes for a New Orleans movie to be called out in my book.
It begins with the script by Robert Tannen. Todd Hickey and he cobbled together the story, but I’m not going to tar Todd with the fault. Tannen alone scripted it, and it’s the screenwriting that’s sore with structural flaws, not the basic premise.
A perfectly nice notion of covert vigilantes collapses when the script of Seeking Justice tries to switch them from cunning puppet masters to ham-handed maniacs halfway through the film. They go from meticulous infiltration and manipulation to chasing Nic Cage in broad daylight on a freeway for no damn good reason.
That lack of reason looms damningly large at the end. I’ll spare you the spoilers and suffice it to say that the events in the climax and the epilogue prove — not suggest; flat-out prove — that the sadistic hunt for Nic Cage was absolutely unnecessary for the bad guys. In fact, they are actively screwing themselves and know it. Guy Pearce and his band of skinhead antagonists start off Seeking Justice as supervillain geniuses, only to switch to sub-morons when action is demanded halfway through.
These plot holes make for a bad enough hangover, but Seeking Justice mixes them with another noxious cocktail: watered-down direction. Roger Donaldson was either rushed or running on fumes, because he got no more than each actor at her or his most mediocre.
This means that Nic Cage has some parts where he shines, because he’s Cage. Pearce is solid, as is his strong suit. But the TV actors — Harold Perrineau and Jennifer Carpenter — seem like they’re drifting through another hour-long drama. January Jones is the worst offender, as much of a slack-faced cipher playing Cage’s rape-victim wife as she was on her first season of Mad Men. Cage’s character toys with her trust, cops sweat her and goons threaten her life, but Jones sails this high-drama territory with a blank, unchanging affect.
Otherwise, Seeking Justice makes no mistakes but wins no laurels. There are a few cool shots, with tension piqued and New Orleans’ shabby majesty displayed, but nothing to wow the audience. It subsists on its plot. And its plot falls apart like cheap beads with the slightest tug of critical thinking.
If you want to shut down that part of your brain and buckle into Seeking Justice, good luck to you. I can hardly imagine you walking away without a haze of WTF clogging your skull. Fans of “reluctant hero” dramas like Taken and Payback might bite for its style of action. Seeking Justice nails tension and suspense. What it doesn’t do is give you any reason to believe in them by the end.
Seeking Justice starts you off with a sly kiss on the cheek and leaves you wanting to shower and get on with your life.
