The set-up is painfully contrived, and the film is littered with the usual plot holes, as the super-secret organization alternates at random between godlike competence and Three-Stooges-level ineptness. Matters aren't helped any by Nicholas Cage, who is spectacularly miscast as a mild-mannered everyman. Given the New Orleans setting, I kept hoping for a reprise of his unhinged performance in Bad Lieutenant—or at the very least an iguana reaction shot. But, alas, there are no iguanas, and no top-drawer Cage performance either. Instead, we get the low-key, empathetic Cage, who wanders through the film looking soddenly pained. He seems to have just noticed that he's going bald, but is trying not to think about it.

The real disappointment here, though, is not with the mechanics or the star, but with what I suppose we have to call the film's vision. Rape-revenge films are often crude, but that crudity can at least connote a kind of honesty. In I Spit on Your Grave, for example, both the rape and the revenge are bluntly dehumanizing. Victim and assailant become little more than bloody hunks of meat, empty corpses shuffling through a hell in which they are both the demons and the tormented. Those who suffer violence and those who commit it are joined in a terrible embrace. "Such," says Simone Weil, "is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone."

In I Spit on Your Grave—or, for that matter, in Hamlet—the trauma and the revenge are not opposed, but complementary. Vengeance is not just a response to violence; it's a continuation of it, and in many ways a capitulation to it. You become what you hate, and that becoming is both exhilaration and despair.

Seeking Justice seems at first to be thinking about such contradictions. Will does, after all, choose vengeance, and that choice leads him into an escalating web of paranoia, violence, and fear. But unfortunately that paranoia, violence, and fear are never allowed to tarnish his essential humane blandness. Will, we are assured, is a good person. He may have authorized a hit on his wife's rapist, but, as he says, he wasn't himself when he did so. His real self, the essential Will, is not a murderer, and remains not a murderer no matter how many people he kills in self-defense or just by-the-way. He has looked upon death, and death has obligingly reflected back the face of a standard issue Hollywood protagonist.