"PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND" // SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2021
Nicolas Cage has branded himself in recent years the king of gonzo cinema, the kind of the weird and strange. His latest shown here at Sundance, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, continues that tradition with a bold, bizarre and wild moviegoing experience. Prolific Japanese director Sion Sono has created his first English language debut here, shot entirely in Japan. The film opens with a wild bank robbery, one that we flash back to several times to get the entire picture of what happened. But we know that something went down wrong, since Nicolas Cage, only known as "Hero," is now chained up and held inside a Japanese bunker. The Governor (Bill Moseley), a man who seems to run everything in this Cowboy style town, shows up to enlist Hero for a dangerous mission: rescue his kidnapped granddaughter Bernice from a place called "Ghostland." To ensure that Hero doesn't simply run off, he's taken some precautions.
He places Hero into an all-black leather suit, set up with explosives. The suit is just as gonzo wild as the rest of the film. For instance, if the suit senses that he's going to attack a "helpless woman," one of the explosions will go off. If he gets too excited around The Governor's granddaughter, the explosives by his privates will explode. Because why not? He's told that he has limited time to do this and given a car. Instead, he picks a small bicycle and slowly speeds away, simply for the visual of Nicolas Cage riding a child size bike. That's the kind of film we're watching.
The set-up, though performed with wild abandon (the townspeople chant and sing together and The Governor, wearing all white, strides around town like he's the Boss Hog of Japan). Once Cage is actually uncaged, the plot goes predictably haywire. Making little sense, he eventually gets to Ghostland, fights, yells, weird things happen, and we get to hear some bonkers dialogue from Cage. He yells "TESTACLES" to a screaming crowd like it's the B-movie "Spartacus." Tells people he's going to karate chop them. It's hilariously strange and incredibly hard to follow. But did we expect anything else? Well, yeah, kinda.
Your patience might start to run thin as well after the umpteenth dream sequence you don't quite understand and the seventeenth time you say to yourself, "Wait...what???" We know what kind of film we're heading into here, and it's usually such a joy to watch Cage be ridiculous in an off-the-rails film. But when the movie is so head scratchingly hard to follow, that joy leaves you pretty quickly. Sion Sono has crafted a visually exciting movie, one that looks like if Mad Max blended itself through Tokyo Disneyland and a Tim Burton movie that has yet to be made. But the overwhelmingly confusing script holds back its real ambitions. PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND is weird, it's wild and it'll most likely become a midnight movie cult classic. But it won't be one of the great ones. It's just be "one of them."
GRADE: C-
WRITTEN BY Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai DIRECTED BY Sion Sono STARRING Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Yuzuka Nakaya FEATURED AS PART OF THE 2021 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL. FOR MORE INFO: PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND