Get ready for the (mildly) crazy, it’s the Prisoners of the Ghostland review!
It was a match made in movie Heaven. Sion Sono, the auteur behind Suicide Club and Exte and the underappreciated Tag teaming up with Nicolas Cage, an actor who embodies a peculiar bravado. Pepper that cinematic meal with Bill Mosely and Sophia Boutella and you have all the makings of a cult classic. While I’m not certain that Prisoners of the Ghostland can achieve a lofty cult status, it is a sight to behold.
The story is simple. Cage, playing the archetypical Man with No name, is a convict imprisoned after a bank robbery gone bad. Following the escape by a group of women, Cage is charged with braving the apocalyptic landscape known as the Ghostland to bring one of them home. The man behind the mission is a white-clad ruler known as The Governor, played by Bill Mosely with typical gusto. And that’s it. Get the girl, bring her home.
What distinguishes Prisoners of the Ghostland is the man behind the lens, Sion Sono. The script borrows heavily from Escape from New York and The Road Warrior, coupling Cage’s quest with a leather suit rigged to blow arms and testicles off, and a wasteland populated by weirdos and villains for Cage to muscle and yowl his way through.
Sono uses a colorful palate to paint the scenery, bright reds for the more civilized town run by the Governor, and dusty yellows for the villains, who may or may not be actual ghosts and are assuredly victims of radiation poisoning. Some of the shot compositions are glorious and gorgeous, and the movie almost gets by on the strength of the production design and moment-to-moment beauty of Sono’s framing.
Yet not all is well in the Ghostlands. The action sequences are uneven, some quite exciting while others fall flat, especially those where Cage is asked to be more acrobatic than his age might allow. Boutella acquits herself well as Bernice, the woman Cage must rescue, probably due to her background as a dancer. Likewise, Tak Sakaguchi, who you may recall as the lead in Ruhei Kitamura’s Versus, kicks all kinds of ass as Yasujiro, a samurai pressed into service by the Governor. Some of the gore goes over the top, but not enough to place it in the splattery annals populated by Tokyo Gore Police or the aforementioned Versus.
And that may well be the tale of Prisoners of the Ghostland. It is a movie that dances near the absurd, but never goes full tilt. Sono operates in a metaphorical space, and this is no different. But the wasteland’s denizens literally holding back time and Cage’s stranger haunted by ghosts is less intriguing than didactic. All these half-measures leave the viewer more disappointed than thrilled or captivated, and so the whole of the movie is more of an interesting experiment from visionary creators rather than a work of vision itself.
That’s not to say there isn’t fun to be mined from the film. There are more than a handful of moments that elicit laughter or wonder or eye-widening at the strangeness unfolding onscreen, but it simply doesn’t amount to a great experience. It’s a strange trifle in Sono’s body of work, an interesting diversion that was filled with promise. Maybe that promise could never be fulfilled, that no movie could live up to the imagined collaboration between Cage and Sono. Regardless, I had my fun with Prisoners of the Ghostland, and there are moments I don’t expect to forget soon, but what is left behind is an odd hollowness, a sense that greatness was approached and not gained.
Sono has said that he wants to work with Cage again, and I can only hope their next effort is a more substantial one.
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