In this tense thriller from Kiwi director Roger Donaldson (Dante's Peak), mild-mannered New Orleans schoolteacher Nicolas Cage gets involved with a shadowy group of vigilantes after his wife (January Jones) is viciously attacked and hospitalised. The fraught situation is exacerbated when the vigilante leader (a frosty, stern-faced Guy Pearce) "requests" that the enraged husband carry out a murder in return for retribution being dealt out to his wife's attacker. However, when Cage gets cold feet, the group turns the screws and forces him to go on the run, not knowing who to trust among the local police, or even his old friends. And is his intended victim really the lowlife criminal he's supposed to be? Cage is relatively restrained (by his overwrought standards) as the terror-stricken everyman of the piece, with the on-screen menace here being provided by shaven-headed Pearce. Donaldson maintains a lively pace, although the story doesn't bear too close an examination for fear of being engulfed by its own plot holes.