Sion Sono is one of the most original and exciting filmmakers still working, creating such astonishing masterpieces as Love Exposure, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, and Tokyo Tribe. With Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono has made his first primarly English language film, and the results are mixed to say the least. At first glance, the unhinged energy of Nicolas Cage and the manic stylings of Sono would seem to be the perfect match. However, something seems to have gotten lost in translation on the way from pre-production to the actual production of Prisoners of the Ghostland, as Cage and his English speaking counterpart actors stumble through the film looking mostly confused. Also, the script for Prisoners of the Ghostland is a cliche-filled mess, with one-dimensional character tropes like the villanious Western town governor/sheriff, the silent and noble samurai, and Cage's troubled Western cowboy with a heart of gold.
Prisoners of the Ghostland is a genre mash-up of Eastern and Western tropes such as the samurai film and the Western, but enfused through an uninspired script about a character known only as Hero (Nicolas Cage) who has to rescue the adopted daughter (Sofia Boutella) of a crooked Western town's governor (Bill Moseley) from a post-apocalyptic, nuclear devastated wasteland. Although this premise sounds promising, Prisoners of the Ghostland is filled with awkwardly staged scenes that veer into the unintentionally hilarious stage. At one point, Cage is supposed to be giving a Spartacus-like rallying cry to his "troops" to rise up against the corrupt governor character, but Sono reduces his inspiring speech to only a few embarrasingly ambigious words. This could be Sono playing with genre tropes and making a commentary on the ridiculousness of classic Hollywood studio films, but it comes more across as Cage not knowing what he's supposed to be saying. Maybe Sono is making a parody of machismo in traditional Western films, but he does so in such an obvious and one-dimensional manner, with less subtley and finesse as he did parodying Japanese samurai and mafia films in better films like Why Don't You Play in Hell? and Cold Fish.
However, not all of Prisoners of the Ghostland is an unmitigated disaster. Sono is still able to instill some of his own unique vision into the film, as in the elaborate production design. He infuses the film's mise en scene with an at times visually astounding mixture of Japanese kabukai style backdrops, post-apocalyptic steampunk cities, and neon-lit landscapes that recall the elaborate backgrounds from Tokyo Tribe. It is also worth noting that the scenes which work best in Prisoners of the Ghostland are the scenes not involving any dialogue, where Sono has to convey his message through visuals and non-verbal cues, such as the chillingly effective flashback sequences where Hero is haunted by the spectre of a boy who was the victim of the film's opening bank robbery sequence.
However, once the English language dialogue begins, Sono is in less sure footing. Dialogue sequences that would be otherwise bitingly hilarious in Sono's Japanese films just come across as gratingly unfunny, and at times Cage's scenery chewing feels more like Nicholas Cage being himself rather than him channeling anything unique about his on-screen character. The other English language leads don't fare any better, as they ramble through their scenes with all the subtlety of soap opera stars. To be fair, Sono doesn't have much to work with as the script for Prisoners of the Ghostland is filled with genre clices, and no matter how many astounding visuals Sono throws at the screen, it can't cover up the mediocirty of his source material.
While earlier works from Sono such as Tokyo Tribe and Tokyo Vampire Hotel built up to exhilaratingly choreographed fight sequences, the last act of Prisoners of the Ghostland is embarrasingly anemic. We see samurais thrust at each other flimsily and gunslingers do their best to enfuse menace into their pistol battles, but it all comes acress like a cheap, high school production of a Sion Sono film. By the time the Hero character has his final battle with the main samurai character of the film, the fight is so anti-climactic and poorly staged that one gets the sense that Sono had given up at that point, and just wanted to end the production so he could go work on something better.
Every great filmmaker has stumbled a few times throughout their careers, as Scorsese did with films like New York, New York, Gangs of New York, and Shutter Island, so Prisoners of the Ghostland is by no means a career ending film for Sono. Perhaps Sono made Prisoners of the Ghostland as a calling card film for the American film industry, as it's his first film funded by a Hollywood production company with mostly English speaking leads. If this is indeed the case, one can only hope that Sono will have a better script to work with next time; one that will give Sono the chance to display to Western audiences the truly unqiue talent that he truly is. In the meantime, it would be a tragedy if most Western audiences only know Sono through Prisoners of the Ghostland, as they will be missing out on a treasure trove of cinematic masterworks.
