A fantasy action movie starring Nicolas Cage as a bank robber tasked with rescuing the niece of the power-crazed Governor from a cursed netherworld, Prisoners of the Ghostland is an outlandish proposition even before you learn that it’s directed by Sion Sono, arguably the most deranged person working in Japanese cinema. Unfortunately, for all its demented Mad Max yakuza meets Monty Python aesthetic and Cage’s most OTT performance in a while (lots of flared lips and gritted teeth), Prisoners soon goes from being a crackpot diversion to an endurance test of extravagant wackiness.
Still, it’s almost worth watching just for the way that Cage delivers the word “testicle”: it sounds as though all the syllables got caught in a combine harvester and then had to be reassembled, with the accents and emphases in the wrong places. It is, like much of the film, utterly barmy.
