Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Just last month we were discussing a more low-key than usual Nic Cage outing in Pig, and I suppose the universe had to find an urgent way of returning to equilibrium. I fear it may rather have overbalanced, as most of Prisoners of the Ghostland is altogether too whackadoodle to explain, or indeed comprehend.
Here Nic Cage is our anti-hero named, checks notes, Hero, a grizzled, all-action criminal incarcerated in the stockades after a bank job goes wrong after his erstwhile partner goes gun crazy and starts shooting up the place, including the children, won’t someone please think of the children. Well, turns out Hero does, his guilty imaginings of the kid along the path to redemption being the closest I can come to extracting any meaning from this.
Ah, yes, redemption, which comes in the shape of the local evil tyrant Governor, Bill Moseley, who wants Hero released to track down his adopted daughter, Sofia Boutella’s Bernice, who had ran off into the Ghostlands from the relative straightjacket-esque safety of, checks notes, Samurai Town, ruled by the Governor and his goons with an iron fist clenching a katana. So, Hero’s given a tight deadline and an exploding leather jumpsuit to enforce said deadline, and is sent off into the wilds of the presumably post-apocalyptic wastelands of, er, wherever this is meant to be set. It’s either Japan or the Wild West. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it knows.
Quite what transpires after this is, well, I’d argue not coherent enough to warrant much further scrutiny – something about Hero being the prophesied one to free a local settlement from some sort of curse, although of course, ultimately it’s all coming back to Hero taking on the Governor’s goons.
It’s all a mess of possibly supernatural, maybe just delirious fever dreams that Care goes through in typical Cage fashion, although for once his performance is outcrazyed by the rest of the visuals and narrative, which is a particularly inchoate blend of Mad Max, Yojimbo (or given the setting, maybe Last Man Standing), Blade Runner and whatever else was lying around, and for me at least it never really coagulates into anything either interesting or coherent. I’d have settled for one or the other, but having neither is a bit of a problem.
I’ve been tangentially aware that director Sion Sono has been making this sort of outré fare for the past few decades, but while I’ve had a few of his films on the ever expanding list of films to get round to (like Suicide Club and Tokyo Tribe), this is my first experience of his work, and it’s not at all positive. Well, okay, there’s a few visually arresting scenes here and some of the action is over the top enough to be mildly interesting, but that’s about it.
Look, I’m not going to roast this film, because I’m quite glad that it exists, and that there are still people making work at the outer limits of what’s deemed commercially acceptable. And I’m sure there will be some people who will be able to get a great deal out of this, even if it’s self evidently not going to find mainstream acceptance.
It’s just, well, the thing is, I’m normally exactly the sort of person who will like this deliberately weird, hyper stylised, fugue state narrative type thing – like all them Takashi Miike films what I done loved many a year ago – and if this is not my cup of tea, I’m left wondering whose thirst this drink is supposed to satisfy. My advice – watch the charmingly batty trailer and imagine a better film.