Nicolas Cage stars in the rescue story of a Western samurai from Sion Sono, set in a post-nuclear desert.
Three years ago, Sundance signed Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, a singularly strange, hyperviolent film that is among the most valuable products of the period for anything for a salary from Nicolas Cage. The radius of a cult film doesn’t hit twice with Ghostland Prisoners, an English effort starring Cage (mostly) by the prolific Japanese director Sion Sono. A mashup of idioms that sends Cage to a kind of underworld to rescue (read: re-kidnap) a young girl from a petty tyrant, alternating between very simplistic and incomprehensible, spending much of her time between the poles of “I understand , but I don’t care “zone. Destined to be quickly forgotten, she would need to play at a festival of the hardcore genre to find an appreciative audience of any size.
Cage plays a man identified only as a Hero, which is strange, since we find him while he is furious while robbing a bank. Okay, he may not be the thief who shoots half a dozen innocent people, but he is definitely a villain.
Years later, he is rotting in a cell when he is taken away by a white-suit bully named The Governor (Bill Moseley). The governor governs a bizarre collection of buildings that seem to be in the middle of nowhere – a kind of theme park mix of samurai-themed establishments (including a geisha brothel) whose inhabitants tend to dress like actors in a western. kimonos. The cult-like volatile vibration here may remind Straight to hell, but the ghost town that Alex Cox envisioned was much more fun to be confused about.
The governor was told that Hero is a man of incomparable skills – the man to find his “granddaughter” Berenice (Sofia Boutella). She disappeared in some vague and dusty Bermuda Triangle out of the governor’s reach; unlike Hero, we know that she left the old man’s care voluntarily. (With enthusiasm, indeed, under the cover of the night.) To ensure that Hero does not mishandle his cargo as soon as he finds it, he is trapped in a black leather jumpsuit with explosive charges sewn onto his elbows, neck and over each of his ( as the governor pronounces) “testicles”. The latter will be triggered if a sensor tuned to your brainwaves thinks your thoughts can be loving. (Readers may be thinking now Escape from New York, and if they want to see it now, instead of reading the rest of it, they’ll make the right choice.)
The hero rides out and is immediately trapped in Ghostland, a Beyond the Thunderdome-as a wasted land whose condemned inhabitants will never be able to leave. He quickly finds Beatrice, who spends most of the rest of the film behaving like a zombie. But his efforts to leave with her go badly, and at one point, he even misses one (while Hero shouts) “test-i-CAAAAL!”
Describing the nature of Ghostland can take several paragraphs here, and it would probably sound a lot more interesting than on screen. Suffice it to say that residents live in the shadow of nuclear technology, both bombs and power plants that accidentally become destructive, and that the film’s production and costume designers had a lot of fun without worrying about why things look as they are. Several scenes watch local residents maintain an incessant tug of war with the second hand of a giant clock, trying to prevent it from advancing because “if time starts to move, everything will explode again”.
All this madness would seem like an ideal setting for, if nothing else, some patented madness by Nic Cage. But even in his most energetic moment here, the actor calls: It’s easy to detect the lines that a fan of the film would quote in his imitations of him – “hi-fuck!”, Anyone? – but Cage here is a faint shadow of his strangest self, and his sincere self never appeared on set.
No, this film belongs to martial artist Tak Sakaguchi, who doesn’t even need to speak to command the screen in the very short and few sequences that present it. Playing Governor Yasujiro’s driver / bodyguard, he is magnetic before he even starts cutting off the violent citizens around him. A samurai whose past is explained in a single sentence, his story is more convincing than things that the film awkwardly takes dozens of minutes to explain. Still: Remind me why he is trying to protect and kill Hero?
Location: Sundance Film Festival (premieres)
Distributor: RLJE Filmes
Developer: XYZ Films
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Yuzuka Nakaya
Director: Sion Sono
Screenwriters: Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai
Producers: Michael Mendelsohn, Reza Sixo Safai, Laura Rister, Ko Mori, Nate Bolotin
Executive producers: Natalie Perrotta, Nick Spicer, Aram Tertzakian, Yuji Sadai, Toyoyuki Yokohama
Director of photography: Sohei Tanikawa
Production designer: Toshihiro Isomi
Costume Designer: Chieko Matsumoto
Editor: Taylor Levy
Composer: Joseph Trapanese
Cast Director: Chelsea Ellis Bloch
102 minutes