Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
Sad Max Beyond Boredom
In an interview published this week, Nicolas Cage announced that he is “never going to retire”.
The actor’s diehard fans took this as cause for celebration.
All I heard was a threat.
Cage’s latest, Prisoners of the Ghostland, is nail #4,576 in a direct-to-video coffin housing the once-great Oscar winner’s bloated, dyed-beard corpse. He’s officially a zombie now, distractedly shambling and shouting his way through director Sion Sono’s low-budget fable about a criminal coerced into rescuing a gang boss’s granddaughter* from the irradiated wasteland outside a town populated by cowboys, ninjas, and courtesans.
No need to run that last sentence through Google Translate: it’s an accurate high-level synopsis for this “movie”.
Sono and screenwriters Aaron Hendry and Rezo Sixo Safai target the “LOL! So random!” crowd with a screenplay that reads like judges reading storyboard descriptions for a genre mash-up competition:
“Draw Nicolas Cage pedaling a kids’ bicycle (with a basket, of course) through a field. Then, have a modern luxury car pull up with a samurai emerging and tossing him the keys!”
“Better yet, what if there’s this Asian guy, see, who’s dressed up like Gary Oldman’s Aristocrat Dracula from Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And he’s trapped Sofia Boutella inside a mannequin that’s made from broken-off parts of other mannequins!”
“Love that! Almost as cool as your 8-foot-tall gumball machine motif!”
“Did you sketch out the scene with the tour bus that’s surrounded by fully armored samurai warrior mutants and driven by the burn-faced monster in aviator shades that we totally didn’t rip off from Highway to Hell?”
“Of course! But that’s nothing. Wait ‘til you see the bit where Cage stands in front of a bombed-out clock tower screaming about his missing testicle to a crowd of superstitious desert freaks!”
I love genre films, and there’s nothing in that imaginary exchange about real Ghostland moments that I wouldn’t love to have seen in an Eli Roth-directed Grindhouse trailer. But at nearly an hour and forty minutes, Sono’s movie plods from one cheap-looking set populated by Halloween Headquarters clearance-vulture extras to the next. The scenes vacillate between Boutella wandering the wasteland with Cage (who’s either narcotized or dialed up to 13), and Bill Moseley, who plays his evil Governor character as the 3 From Hell version of Otis Firefly with a geisha fetish and a penchant for white suits.
There is dialogue. There is singing. There are fights. There are gruesome deaths. But this creative team exhibits a unique talent for making it seem as though hours pass between each fleeting moment of narrative consequence.
Even the film’s single genuine surprise is undermined by the need to let Cage do whatever the hell he wants: Despite having one of his balls blown off early in the story, he carries on walking, running, screaming, and fighting (despite not being a mutant, a superhero, or someone who takes frequent adrenaline injections).
I keep referring to Cage’s character as “Cage”. He’s not actually named in the movie and is credited simply as “Hero” on IMDb.
It’s fitting.
His turn in Prisoners of the Ghostland is the work of a genuinely talented star who has, for whatever reason, officially substituted “his thing” for acting. Instead of being punished for apparently giving up on professional growth, he’s been rewarded with a string of movies in which “his thing” is passable enough to qualify as a performance.
You know Cage’s “thing” by now. Thousand-yard stare. Clipped, grunted dialogue punctuated by occasional fly-off-the-handle mania. And that trademark screeching teakettle explosion--once the signature of a wily, fresh, and unpredictable actor; now just an inevitable, eardrum-bullying catchphrase.
I know people who’ve praised his work in the movie Pig, but this is the same crowd that places films like Mandy (a brainy bit of otherworldly artistry that both rides and channels Cage’s wavelength) on the same pedestal as Color Out Of Space (grade-school Lovecraftian junk) and Mom and Dad (ugly and trite suburban-living critique).
Or this movie, for that matter.
All movies in the “Cage-aissance” are somehow to be taken at the same botoxed face value. As if it’s supposed to be enough that the former Hollywood titan has blessed the VOD market with his presence. Sorry, it’s not.
When he wants to, Nicolas Cage can create lovable, memorable maniacs that still register as human beings. Whether he’s playing a lovelorn gambler in Honeymoon in Vegas or voicing a hard-boiled alternate-universe Spider-Man in Into the Spider-Verse, one can observe deliberate calibrations of nuance, control, and even relatability in each performance--meaning that if and when his characters do erupt, we recognize the moment as punctuation instead of an All Caps paragraph.
That’s all to say I’m done wasting time on new Nic Cage movies (unless he pops up again in Spider-Verse 2). I’ve grown tired of these tacky endeavors anchored by a bored, post-ironic actor.
You can join me, too, if you’d like. Let’s watch some real movies, whaddya say? Ones that make us think, feel, and imagine--rather than making us prisoners of the runtime.
*For those who’ve seen the movie: I know Boutella’s character is not really the villain’s granddaughter. I just didn’t want to explain the convoluted backstory of their relationship.
