Thank God Nicolas Cage Once Again Gets to “Go Full Cage” in Prisoners of the Ghostland

“I’d heard that after his first recording session he did a few of the lines and the director kept making notes. And then Nicolas just turned and he was like ‘Oh, you want me to go full Cage?’ … He brought the Cage.”—Paul Watling, head of story, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Before you argue that Nicolas Cage is a good actor or a bad actor, you probably need to clarify your criteria, cite your sources, show your work. You need a corkboard and pushpins and yarn. You need a lot of time on your hands. I am not here to argue either way: I submit that he’s one of the most interesting and one of the most perplexing actors who still commands so much attention and puts in so many performances. Cage works constantly, and whether all the movies he’s in are any good is almost beside the point. Cage is in the movie, so you are getting something special.

Prisoners of the Ghostland, Japanese director Sion Sono’s dreamlike post-apocalyptic spaghetti samurai flick, seems to draw from every cinematic well in reach. Sono chose Cage to anchor a movie that mixes together samurai films and the Westerns of Leone with the give-no-fucks-but-compelled-to-adventure antihero from John Carpenter. There’s a dash of Mad Max and more than a little Jodorowsky somewhere in all of it, too. It’s easy to imagine another actor looking and feeling woefully out of place in this specific kind of pastiche. Cage is very, very much at home in it.

In an indeterminate apocalyptic future, or maybe an alternate present—maybe in Japan, maybe anywhere else—a trio of women have fled from Samurai Town, a place with a very specific multicultural aesthetic under the thumb of a petty local tyrant, the Governor (Bill Moseley), who wears an all-white cowboy politician suit and speaks in a drawl. His hired muscle comes in two flavors: Six-gun-strapped cowboy dudes and katana-wielding samurai dudes, the mightiest of whom is Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi, a veteran of wild Japanese action flicks).

One of the escapees, Bernice (Sofia Boutella), is the Governor’s daughter, and since he can’t abide not being the center of everyone’s world, he frees Cage’s nameless prisoner from the hard time he’s been doing since a bank robbery that went wrong and tasks him with hunting Bernice down. Cage (credited only as “Hero”) is strapped into a suit with explosive charges that will blow off his arms, balls, and head if he attempts escape or indiscretion, and he’s given three days and a Toyota Celica to go bring her back. (He so disdains his directive that he initially ditches the car and lights out on a bicycle purely out of spite before relenting. Everybody in Samurai Town thinks this is badass.)

The radioactive wasteland is haunted by a crew of ghostly, samurai armor-clad highwaymen who trap Cage in “the Ghostland,” an odd junkpile commune of castoffs who seem right out of El Topo or The Holy Mountain. Our hero must recover Bernice before he loses his head, but just as you suspect if you’ve seen a few movies like this, the real question is whether he can slip his explosive leash and dispense some actual justice to those who deserve it.

Cage may not make it out of the adventure with all of his extremities intact, but (just like Snake Plissken), he manages to get the last word in a world that wants him to believe there’s nothing left to say.