Justice Released 18 November 2011 Director Roger Donaldson Starring Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce, January Jones Writer(s) Robert Tannen Producer(s) Ram Bergman, Tobey Maguire, James D. Stern Origin United States Running Time 104 minutes Genre Thriller, action Rating 15A

45

Just is shit.

If I was to pinpoint one defining characteristic of this suspense thriller it would be the proliferation of convoluted instructions. Elaborate ruses have been commonplace in fiction even going back as far as the Bible, where Judas had to kiss Jesus in order to identify him (could have just pointed at him behind his back). Justice sees Nicholas Cage play an English teacher who, distraught after the rape of his wife (Mad Men’s January Jones), accepts an offer from a mysterious stranger (Guy Pearce) to have the rapist assassinated. Rather than Cage say ‘Yeah, ok, do it’, he had to go to a vending machine and buy two ‘Forever’ chocolate bars at a certain time to let Pearce know he was up for it. Could you imagine if John Gilligan when ordering the hit on Veronica Guerin was like: “Right lads, if I go into Mace at twenty past one and order a bag of Taytos, a bottle of red lemonade and ten penny sweets, then ye’ll know it’s on.”

This movie really is a ‘by the numbers’ effort. The instructions to make it could have been on Mary Fitzgerald’s How Do You Do. It is as forgettable as where you left your keys. The only real achievement is the natural, intimate relationship depicted by Cage and Jones at the start of the film. Jones really looks like she is in love with her husband and while Cage looks like he is just in love with his own acting, it is affecting nonetheless. Refreshingly, their sex scene is full of smiling, laughing and intimacy as befits a married couple, rather than the usual ‘passionate’, sweaty, writhing riding. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie mainly consists of Cage’s worried face.

The Hollywood giant is a curious actor. Having produced some of the most memorable performances I’ve seen (Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas), he has also produced a lot of commercial filler. It is hard to know where his heart lies, Art House or Blockbuster as he flits between the two so randomly. He does show glimpses of his talent early on but I was distinctly disappointed by his underwhelming reaction to his wife’s rape. Leaving Las Vegas and Bad Lieutenant would leave you in no doubt as to the extremities of Cage’s emotional range so when he just kicks a bin after the brutalisation of his wife, one is left feeling a little short changed, as nobody can do manic like Nicholas Cage.

Like Cage, the director too has not had his finest hour. He is quite heavy-handed, full of flashbacks, voiceovers and excessive ‘showing, not telling’. While a cornerstone principle of modern cinema, sometimes I wouldn’t mind a character saying what’s going on in their mind rather than a sequence of ‘telling’ behaviours that reveal the turmoil the character is going through. In Justice, January Jones, traumatised by her rape, keeps locking the doors, asking her husband lots of paranoid questions, taking shooting lessons, buying a gun, all just to reveal to us what she is going through. Call me old-fashioned but a rich conversation between Cage and Jones, two fine actors, may have been far more rewarding.

There are also some obvious rips from The Wire. The influence of this programme shows no signs of abating and if Justice is anything to go by, then there are plenty of sub-standard writers and directors willing to attempt to siphon off some of its glow. Now those of you who know and love The Wire will be familiar with the convention in the Baltimore Police Department of waking their dead colleagues in an Irish bar with The Pogues 'Body of an American' playing as everyone toasts the dead in a quite irreverent fashion. In Justice, a murdered journalist is waked in an almost identical way. The irreverence is shown by a picture of the deceased sticking his middle finger up (literally, the least subtle direction I have ever seen) while some gombeen Irish singer has the unfortunate task of capturing the romance and rabble-rousing of The Pogues and obviously, fails miserably. The main reason why this scene is so ill-conceived is because unlike the Police Force in Baltimore, Journalism in New Orleans has almost certainly no strong Irish heritage whatsoever. One suspects the writer made the character Irish just so he could rip off The Wire which is exactly what is wrong with the writing in this film. The scene even contains the lines “Marshy was a great guy. And one hell of a journalist”. AAAAGGHHH!!

Justice is littered with staples. Car chases, twists, even a token political comment (Hurricane Katrina blah, blah, blah). I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say the old grey matter won’t be exercised unduly by this film. It is, however, standard fare so if you like standard fare then this is not particularly bad, just irritating if you are looking for something to capture your imagination. Like seeing a Don Conroy Owl when hoping to find a Van Gogh.

- Eoin Murphy