Justice   Starring: Nicholas Cage, Guy Pearce and January Jones Momentum Pictures RRP: £17.99 MP1142D Certificate: 15 Available 26 March 2012

Inner city High School teacher Will Gerard lives a life of content with his beautiful musician wife Laura until one night’s horrific events turn their world upside down when Laura is left for dead after being violently attacked. Whilst Will is waiting anxiously as Laura lays helpless in hospital, he is approached by a well dressed man, who offers to dispense immediate justice to the attacker and save the couple from a traumatic trial. Confused and distraught, Will accepts the proposal and is soon pulled into an underground vigilante organisation that leads to frightening and dangerous consequences. Soon he learns that justice comes at a price...

Justice stars Nicholas Cage as Will Gerard, January Jones as Will's wife Laura and Guy Pearce as the mysterious Simon.

When you break it down, the film doesn't sound very impressive and to be honest I'm surprised that the paper thin plot was stretched as much as it was without it being more obvious. It's a strictly by the numbers affair that is so predictable that you know exactly what's coming way before it arrives. Yes, this borrows just about every cliche from other movies, but that's not really important because Justice manages to hold its head above the water and somehow emerge as a film that is much more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

The Will/Laura relationship doesn't feel all that believable - probably because Cage is 48 and Jones is 34 - that's a bit too wide an age gap to not appear mildly stomach churning. Okay, it's not that big a deal, and there are countless relationships with this age gap, but it feeds into Hollywood's fantasy that younger women and older men is the norm. In addition Laura is only included to kick start Cage off on his adventure, after that she may as well not appear at all. In fact, I couldn't help thinking that this movie was originally written for a younger main star - having someone whose nearly 50 running around all over the place feels a little odd and it does feel like a more naive character would have worked better than the worldly wise one we end up with. However, that's not to detract from the fact that Cage turns in a great performance - and he does look good for his age.

On the positive side, the twists and turns of Will's discoveries about the organisation are engaging and it's difficult not to get caught up in the action. However, don't think too hard otherwise the cracks in the plot start to show. Why is the disabled security camera not checked to make sure it's still disabled when Will returns to the scene to carry out his mission? And why does Simon steal the other security camera footage that shows Will is innocent. Wouldn't it have been simpler all round to steal the footage from both cameras or make sure both were disabled? How can Lieutenant Durgan get away with what he does? And if Simon and his goons can kill so easily, why don't they conduct all the messy jobs and leave those that they help to do simpler tasks as their "favour". I mean, most people are likely to put on the brakes when they realise they are going to have to kill someone and so Simon is going to have to threaten a lot of his new recruits when their time comes to kill. Wouldn't it just be easier for Simon and those close to him, to simply kill the criminals and let those he helps do research on future hits and other mundane work? This way the organisation is more likely to stay off the police radar.

But, of course, this is light entertainment and not meant for close scrutiny and mindless nit-picking. If you come to this with an open mind, and just go with the flow, you'll enjoy the ride.

The only extra is a trailer for the movie.

7

Darren Rea