Nicolas Cage yells “Testicle!” before a crowd of post-apocalyptic captives in Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland. With its inventive art direction and fever-pitched visuals, this dystopian adventure plays like a grindhouse version of the Brothers Quays’ grimy, nightmarish aesthetic. Unfortunately, none of this is a good thing.
Cage stars as a nameless Hero who’s spent years in jail for a bank robbery-turned massacre. The Governor (Bill Moseley) has taken Cage out of prison to assign a crucial task: find his long-lost granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) and bring her back unharmed. The Hero’s task is made more urgent by the means of a custom leather uniform rigged with explosive charges placed over his throat, each arm and each testicle. If he raises his hand to Bernice—boom! If he’s aroused by her—boom! If he doesn’t complete his task in the allotted time—boom!
As dystopian concepts go, it’s not bad. The opening bank robbery is a fairly stunning miniature, the sterile financial institution bursting with highly saturated colors—and, eventually, blood and broken glass. And as the Hero is dragged into the center of the strange Japanese town where the Governor rules the roost, the dazzling photography seems to promise, at the very least, some distracting eye candy.
Alas, things start to go wrong when, after the Governor gives the Hero his assignment, the townspeople break out into some strange song. It’s not the only song Prisoners has to offer; to find Bernice, the Hero must travel through the Ghostland, whose ragged prisoners wander some kind of construction site with a huge clock in its center, and who themselves push forward the narrative not with coherent dialogue but with a goofy-grimy production number. But this is no Annette.
Visually, there’s no lack of interest. The Hero finds Bernice among “the mannequins,” slaves whose bodies are hidden behind fragments of plaster faces that evoke the stop-motion animation of the Brothers Quay. But here’s the thing; in short films like “Street of Crocodiles,” Stephen and Timothy Quay created fantastically textured worlds; but when the twins expanded their aesthetic to feature films, they couldn’t tell a coherent narrative to save their lives. Such is the problem with Sion Sono, who throws everything he can think of (a considerable amount) into this production but forgets to tell a compelling story—or, worse, he works against the story with musical numbers that try too damn hard.
By the time one of the Hero’s testicle charges inevitably explodes, even one of Cage’s signature freak-outs can’t make this work. There’s talent here, and you keep waiting for somebody to do something interesting with all that money, but after that colorful bank robbery opening, it’s all downhill.
Earlier this year, the subdued drama Pig proved that maybe what Cage needed was a director who could rein him in. That’s not what he gets here. Sono had a heart attack before shooting began, and he obviously recovered well enough to put everything he had into Prisoners of the Ghostland. But would it have hurt him to hold back, just a little?
Photo courtesy of RLJE
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