Prisoners of the Ghostland – Film Review

In the treacherous frontier city of Samurai Town, a ruthless bank robber (Nicolas Cage) is sprung from jail by a wealthy warlord, The Governor (Bill Moseley), whose adopted granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) has run away. Strapped into a leather suit that will self-destruct within five days if he doesn’t find the missing girl, the bandit sets off on a journey to find the young woman — and his own path to redemption.

Every once in a while, I feel the strange urge to watch a Nicolas Cage movie – there is just something so oddly endearing about watching him in a movie, no matter what it is, because you know one-hundred-percent that he’s going to give his all. Really think about it – when was the last time you watched one of his movies where he didn’t deliver an out-there performance? Even though he was quiet and multi-layered in the excellent Pig, he still had that Cage charm that’s present in every one of his works, and this was one of the biggest reasons why I was excited for Prisoners of the Ghostland.

And as soon as about five minutes passed in this film, I knew I was going to be in for one hell of a wild ride, and boy was I ever right. Prisoners of the Ghostland is without a doubt one of the most insanely bizarre and in-your-face movies I’ve seen this whole year and presents some truly bold ideas. The general premise of this film is kind of boring if you were to look at it on paper. A guy gets strapped with a series of bombs, gets told he has to find a girl and bring her back or else he will explode. That’s really no different than the Suicide Squad premise if you think about it.

In that film (and its new and significantly better sequel), the titular squad of supervillains are told by Viola Davis‘ Amanda Waller that if they don’t stop the big enemy that threatens to destroy the world, then she will detonate the explosive collar around their necks. But what makes Prisoners of the Ghostland so special is the execution. One of the most entertaining aspects of the film is seeing the city of Samurai Town and the way the inhabitants go about their daily lives.

To put things short, it’s kind of like hell on Earth. The place is essentially an eerie ghost-town filled with run-down buildings and is the home of some serious crimes. The residents are told they absolutely cannot escape and that’s all due to the ruling of The Governor, who absolutely everybody is terrified of. When you give him a once over, he’s really not that scary-looking. He’s just an old man in a white suit and top hat that enforces a set of rules, but it’s his demeanor and beliefs that chill the residents to the bone.

Because of how insane and unhinged he is, it’s understandable why his daughter Bernice would not want to return home which makes things ten times more difficult for Cage’s character Hero. But, after all, he has to do absolutely everything he can in order to bring Bernice back, or else it’s his life on the line. Although Prisoners doesn’t go into as much depth as it could about its themes and subject matter, it still does a good job at depicting how far one is willing to go just so they can save their own life.

And of course, Cage is absolutely amazing to watch in this film, and it’s not just because he is insanely over-the-top here (which he is) but because he delivers a genuinely good performance filled with sorrow, remorse, and all-around badassery which we have come to expect from him by now. Sofia Boutella also gets a juicy role here and her character gets some truly surprising amount of depth in the third act of the film especially.

However, there are certainly some instances in which Prisoners is just not all that entertaining to watch, particularly in the second act. Once Hero is sent off to go ahead and find Bernice, you’d expect the film to be relentlessly paced and wholly entertaining from that point onward to the end, but it’s not. The film makes the decision to pause and explore the city of Samurai Town for a while, and although it’s definitely interesting to see how this insanely post-apocalyptic-looking place operates, it pulls us out of the actual story for a good twenty to twenty-five minutes.

That, plus some of the dialogue here is just straight-up bad, with some characters feeling like parodies of action movie heroes. There is one character in this film named Psycho who essentially serves no real importance to the story and has some of the cheesiest lines I’ve heard all year.

But when Prisoners of the Ghostland delivers, it packs quite the good punch, and those who love off-beat and unconventional neo-noir Western films are going to get a ton of enjoyment out of this in the long run, even if it has a few stumbles along the way.