An early gift from Saint Nic
“Prisoners of the Ghostland” is equal parts visual delight and narrative head-scratcher. Most of all, it’s a hefty dose of Nicolas Cage set to full-tilt gonzo.
The most surprising thing? It’s the first movie where Cage has timed explosives strapped to his testicles. It just seems like, you know, something he’d have done by now.
This carnival of post-apocalyptic tropes sees the pairing of Cage with Japanese auteur Sion Sono (“Tokyo Tribe”) in the director’s first Englishlanguage outing.
Cage’s character, Hero — in prison for a very unheroic bank robbery that killed a kid — is hauled out at the whim of the Governor (Bill Moseley), the campy, white-suited leader of a Wild West-meets-geisha-brothel called Samurai Town.
He dispatches Hero to rescue his daughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) from a zone called the Ghostland — but not before strapping him into the aforementioned explosives, which will shred him if he doesn’t bring her back within five days.
What Hero finds in the Ghostland is a community of outcasts, scavengers, quasi-zombies and other survivors, all enslaved to the worship of a giant clock whose hands they must keep from moving. If time starts again, they say, the world will blow up. Some, like Bernice, get sealed up inside old-timey dress-store mannequins. Some, looking like the denizens of the “Mad Max” movies, tinker with scrounged vehicles wearing outfits made of trash.
I was disappointed the dynamic Boutella didn’t have more to do — she’s kept pretty firmly in the damsel-in-distress role most of the time.
If you’re planning to enjoy this, don’t ask too many questions. Just embrace the spectacle. Maybe the geishas have the right idea: Relegated to a one-note performance, at least they get to giggle through it all.
Running time: 100 minutes. Not rated (language, violence). In theaters and on Amazon Prime Video.