Nicolas Cage has steadily built a reputation for being a kooky actor, with recent performances seeing him dialling the craziness up to eleven; Sion Sono is a director who seems to be trying to outdo Takashi Miike in terms of surreality. Prisoners of the Ghostland, from the producers of Mandy, sees Cage and Sono teaming up to bring us what has to be the most thoroughly contrived piece of bizarre cinema I have ever seen. It's wall-to-wall weirdness, but everything feels so meticulously calculated to confound that it proves irksome in the extreme.
The basic plot sounds like exploitation heaven: when wealthy warlord The Governor (Bill Moseley) discovers that his adopted granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) has hightailed it into the badlands, he springs a notorious criminal (Cage) from jail and offers him his freedom if he can bring the missing girl back. To ensure compliance, the criminal is fitted with a leather jumpsuit with explosives fitted to the neck, arms and groin, which will explode if he fails to follow orders.
Sadly, Sono's approach makes the movie an impenetrable mess, every frame an exercise in the absurd - if the aim was to make a film guaranteed to bore, irritate and confuse in equal measures, then he succeeded. The director captures some stunning visual compositions with breath-taking use of colour, which makes it all the more frustrating that nothing in the film makes any sense, and most of it is just plain annoying. I have my suspicions that Cage didn't know what was going on either, but he was probably just grateful for the pay check, and does his crazy routine obligingly.
1/10. By all means watch if you absolutely have to see Cage holding his own bloody testicle after it has been blown off by one of the suit bombs, but don't say I didn't warn you.
The basic plot sounds like exploitation heaven: when wealthy warlord The Governor (Bill Moseley) discovers that his adopted granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) has hightailed it into the badlands, he springs a notorious criminal (Cage) from jail and offers him his freedom if he can bring the missing girl back. To ensure compliance, the criminal is fitted with a leather jumpsuit with explosives fitted to the neck, arms and groin, which will explode if he fails to follow orders.
Sadly, Sono's approach makes the movie an impenetrable mess, every frame an exercise in the absurd - if the aim was to make a film guaranteed to bore, irritate and confuse in equal measures, then he succeeded. The director captures some stunning visual compositions with breath-taking use of colour, which makes it all the more frustrating that nothing in the film makes any sense, and most of it is just plain annoying. I have my suspicions that Cage didn't know what was going on either, but he was probably just grateful for the pay check, and does his crazy routine obligingly.
1/10. By all means watch if you absolutely have to see Cage holding his own bloody testicle after it has been blown off by one of the suit bombs, but don't say I didn't warn you.