Prisoners of the Ghostland

In a weird old west Japanese world, the Governor (Bill Moseley) rules a town with his time obsession and his stable of young women. Ghostland is the wasteland beyond. Some of the girls escape. The Governor uses captured criminal Hero (Nicolas Cage) to retrieve his favorite Bernice (Sofia Boutella). He puts Hero in a leather suit rigged to explode. Hero's former partner Psycho (Nick Cassavetes) is a real psycho.

This is Escape from New York and Judge Dredd and whatever craziness coming out of director Sion Sono's brain. Nick Cage is doing more of his weirdness and I applaud him. I want to him all the room he needs. In this case, it's too weird even for me. It gets unwieldy. There's one small example. In the first group tick tock moment, not everybody is moving their heads in the same way. Sono needs to sell that by doing disturbing unison movements. I'm willing to go with the weirdness but it has to be done better. This is style over control. This is walking on a knife's edge. In the end, I can't recommend this except for Cage's completists and Sono fans.

Nicholas Cage continues his streak of incredibly odd film choices. I didn't like this one as much. At first, I was enjoying how wild it was, throwing all kinds of different, silly elements together. Eventually, it just felt like they didn't have much of a story, and the crazy stuff started to get less entertaining. I think the filmmakers thought they were being artsy, humorous, or both. I didn't feel that way.

Genre-bending, yes. But somehow finds a way to ruin each individual genre they play with. Utterly nonsensical plot, weak effects, not a single likable character, horrid dialogue, and some pretty atrocious lighting don't make for a great movie watching experience.

Nicolas Cage did it again! I don't get what his deal is? He's not a bad actor so it's always a mystery to me why he agrees to those stinkers all the time. Does he even read the scripts? Or is it just about money for him? Will he just do anything as long as you pay him? Prisoners Of The Ghostland is another movie with Nicolas Cage that is painful to watch. Not visually though, that was actually fine and that's why I scored it with three stars, but the story, or more the lack of a comprehensible story, that's what makes this movie bad. Nothing makes really sense, you almost know it from the start but you continue watching it in the hope something will change, but it doesn't... Another timewasting movie that I wished I didn't watch.

If you want to spend some time with a 2021 Nicolas Cage vehicle, please check out "Pig," which despite that odd title is actually one of the best films of the year and serves as reminder of how great Cage can be with the right material.

Despite the director's ambitious vision, there is simply so much that feels reminiscent of the Mad Max franchise. I really wanted to love this film, but I didn't. If you're a Cage fan, Prisoners of the Ghostland is worth a look.