Prisoners of the Ghostland
**Seen at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
If you ever wanted to see Nicolas Cage get his own “Man With No Name” movie, “Prisoners of the Ghostland” is that. Now, we can only hope to get a few more of them, including the analogous “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”-like epic- I feel like that would be fun as Hell.
The movie begins with a bank robbery in Samurai Town with Cage and Nick Cassavetes as the stick-up men. The interior of the bank is all white, making the blood spilled, the gumballs a young boy is admiring, and black that Cage is wearing all the more impactful. The next thing we see is a geisha house, and one woman is taken out of the city, only to find themselves in a prison area known as Ghostland. It’s not long before Cage is released from prison by The Governor (Bill Moseley) to look for the woman who left, who turns out to be his daughter, Bernice (Sofia Boutella). Cage has five days to do that, and he’s given a leather outfit to do it in, with some strategically-placed bombs.
This is my first experience with director Sion Sono (making his English-language debut), and I will make sure it is not the last. (The easiest way to assure that- continue this collaboration with Cage.) The movie very much trades in “lone hero” tropes and cliches, but that is very much by design; it’a the way it’s done that makes this movie special. This is a send-up of American action films that have brazenly lifted from Asian cinema over the years, while also building a world that could also be explored it further installments. And having the biggest villains be these over-the-top cowboys and psychopaths only confirms Sono’s intentions. All the while, this movie allows Cage to be Cage, and he’s still one of the best screen presences of all-time. I love when he’s in the sumo thong in the middle of Samurai Town after being taken from prison. I love how he emphasizes certain words during a monologue- and one, in particular, slayed me this time out. I love how he equates himself in an action sequence, and how he sells a reunion with Cassavetes that is so bat-shit bizarre you just have to go with it. He delivers for Sono’s wild world, and Sono gives him a beautifully crazy, and just beautiful, world to be himself in.
