Delayed Reaction: Prisoners of Ghostland

Premise: An imprisoned hero is tasked with finding the governor's daughter in a post-apocalyptic (or just super weird and stylized) world.

 

It's a shame more movies don't take a LEGO Movie approach to world-building. Embrace not the absurdity but the creativity. Certain filmmakers (many East Asian for whatever reason) are good at this. They pull indiscriminately from different genres to build a world that doesn't make any logical sense but is scattered yet up a piece. Prisoners of Ghostland is part western, part feudal japan, part fantasy, part Mad Max. The ghostland production design is basically "what if we made cool stuff out of a junkyard".

 

It's barely worth it to describe what the movie is about, since it's all pretty nuts. Nic Cage went to jail years ago for a bank robbery gone wrong. The governor of his region/town (I'm not sure. The civic structure of this world isn't that mapped out) gives him up to five days to find and return his missing daughter in exchange for freedom. To keep Cage in line until then, he straps him into a suit with explosives on the neck (goes off if he tries to take it off), arms (explode if he hurts his daughter), and crotch (if he gets aroused by the daughter). Yeah - it's that kind of movie. The daughter has disappeared in a wasteland haunted by the ghosts of an accident with a prisoner transport or something. Honestly, that's about where the movie lost me and I turned my brain off. It's a lot.

 

This isn't a perfect movie by any means. It's pretty scattered. It's aware enough to know how much of it is funny, but I think it could've gone even heavier on that. This feels odd to say, but I think Nic Cage could've even hammed it up more. I was really disappointed that there wasn't more for Sofia Boutella to do. This is the perfect kind of movie to take advantage of how well she moves. That's still her greatest strength. To examine this movie too closely is to miss the point. So, I think the only acceptable criticism of it is "I wish it was even wilder".

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend