Nicolas Cage — winner of The Post’s Golden Turkey Award for worst actor last year — has finally reached the point of no return.
After portraying an extensive gallery of homicidal oddballs (living and, more and more frequently, dead), he’s no longer believable as a regular human being.
In the dull, silly revenge thriller “Seeking Justice,’’ Cage is improbably cast as Will, a mild-mannered, chess-playing high school English teacher in New Orleans.
He sheds tears when his beautiful, cello-playing wife (January Jones of “Mad Men,’’ whose terrible big-screen performances are beginning to turn her into Cage’s female opposite number) is brutally raped.
Will reluctantly agrees when Simon (Guy Pearce), the shadowy head of a mysterious vigilante group, offers to dispose of the ex-con rapist if Will will agree to perform any “small’’ favor the organization might require in the future.
Our hero seems genuinely surprised when this turns out to involve something other than tutoring someone in Shakespeare’s sonnets after class.
He refuses an assignment to help dispatch another miscreant, but ends up helping the intended victim accidentally kill himself.
Now Will has the police and the vigilante organization on his case, as the story gets more and more dopey.
For starters, why enlist amateurs in this wacky payback-it-forward scheme when the vigilantes have to devote so much effort to pressuring them to do the deed, then covering up for them afterward?
Completed four years ago, “Seeking Justice’’ is dutifully directed, with an absolute minimum of thrills, by Roger Donaldson, whose credits include the terrific “No Way Out’’ (1987).
That film’s title is a pretty good description of where Cage’s career seems to be headed.
For starters, he shouldn’t do any more movies in which his character signals his acceptance of a Faustian bargain by buying two candy bars.