In Seeking Justice, a man whose wife is assaulted and raped makes a deal with a mysterious vigilante organization that exacts revenge on his behalf but demands from him a favor to be named later. If you’re thinking that sounds like something that will turn out to be a bargain he regrets, you are correct!

And if it also sounds like the kind of disposable movie you’ll not catch the title of but will happily half pay attention to on cable some day, well, you’d be right on that account too, though this film has a cast peculiarly heavy on name actors for something getting a minor release. Nicolas Cage plays the husband in question, a New Orleans teacher named Will Gerard, and January Jones (perpetually bored and disdainful) is his wife Laura. Guy Pearce is the head of the unnamed group, Harold Perrineau and Jennifer Carpenter are the couple’s friends. Roger Donaldson, of The Recruit, Species, Cocktail and others, directs this thriller, which goes from adequate to ludicrous but is only ever compelling enough to serve as audiovisual wallpaper while you’re focused on something else.

Some of the film’s limpness is due to the fact that Cage plays Will in a minor weird key as opposed to one of his major ones — there are no fits of operatic oddness. At this point in his career, Cage doesn’t seem capable of playing normal, only varying degrees of strange, and having him take on the role of an everyman in over his head is a futile endeavor — he already appears much nuttier than any conspiracy posse Seeking Justice can come up with. (Even the way he jogs looks just a little off.) The one it does present is so powerful you’d think it wouldn’t need to bother with its complicated recruiting structure, which…