I‘d immediately write this off as a piece of Direct-to-DVD trash (ala last years Tresspass), if it were not for Roger Donaldson at the helm. Like John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet before him, Donaldson (Thirteen Days, The Bank Job), tends to consistently make solid more-or-less-grounded genre efforts that stand above the usual array of hack-work polluting the action-thriller section. No he’s not quite as good as his similarly named (I often confuse the two!) contemporary Roger Mitchell (Changing Lanes, Enduring Love) but if you want yeoman’s work, Donaldson is your man.
Here a shaved headed Guy Pearce drops a Star-Chamber-esque service into the lap of every-man Nic Cage (as if!) following the maiming of his wife (January Jones) leaves her hospitalized (probably some irate X-men fan.) The faustian bargain: We’ll give you vigilante justice if you owe us an undisclosed favour down the road. Of course the favour down the road has Cage dodging the sliding rear wheels of a 6 tonne flatbed truck. Lots of intensely silly mayhem ensues. Seeking Justice looks to sit somewhere in the middle ground between modern vigilante fantasies; not as outright stupid as the similar Gerard Butler-vehicle, Law Abiding Citizen nor as talky or restrained as the Jodie Foster-vehicle The Brave One.
Of course, it will be worth watching this movie, when it drops into theatres March 16, just to get to this image:
