Someday, when they deliver my eulogy, they will say “he watched a lot of Nicolas Cage movies.” And this was one of them. Cage stars as a high school English teacher (!) who is married to a musician played by January Jones (!!) and colleagues with Michael from Lost, Harold Parrineau (!!!) After his wife is brutally beaten and raped, Cage is approached in the hospital by a mysterious man called Simon (Guy Pearce) who runs an underground vigilante Amway service, where they will get your revenge in exchange for a favour to be named later. Not in his right mind, Cage agrees and the rapist is supposedly killed. Case closed…
…Until a little while later, when Cage is asked to follow a man who is allegedly a pedophile and then arrange a fatal accident for him. Cage refuses and the vigilante group starts to target him instead. And this is where it gets extra weird: the pedophile is in fact an investigative reporter on the trail of the vigilantes, and Cage searching everywhere for his evidence bears no small resemblance to the Andrew Garfield section of the excellent British miniseries Red Riding.
Anyway, there is chasing and hostage taking and betrayal and shooting and Nic Cage tearing the still-beating hearts from his enemies and all the things you would probably expect. Watch Red Riding instead, basically.
