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.
Ridley Scott reimagines the film that made him famous in this grand and impressive science fiction piece starring Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, and Logan Marshall-Green. Probably the easiest way to explain this film is with this formula:
What a fun surprise, this movie. Guy Pearce plays a disgraced cop accused of killing another officer and hiding evidence contained in a metal briefcase. Maggie Grace (forever to me poor Shannon from Lost) is the President’s daughter, taken hostage while investigating a supermax prison that houses 500 criminal masterminds. Pearce is given the option of infiltrating the prison in order to rescue her, and he agrees to do so, mainly so that he can find his former partner who went to jail for helping hide the briefcase; Pearce believes that if he can find it again, he can prove his innocence.
