Now I’ll be honest, I don’t see a lot of movies these days, both because I have zero interest in ever going to a theater but also because most things out there just don’t appeal to me anymore. That said, I did catch Prisoners of the Ghostland, mostly because it’s got Nic Cage in it and he’s just so entertaining on his own that it makes up for even the worst movies that he’s been in.

And he’s been in a lot of really bad movies.

So how did this one fare? Let’s take a look.The biggest problem here is that it’s a world without meaning, done for shits and giggles without actually meaning anything. Right from the very beginning, director Sion Sono went hard into the new world, yet nowhere did that world ever have any meaning to the story. It was just weird shit for the sake of weird shit and it wound up being nothing but distracting. You could have set the movie in the real world with very few changes and it wouldn’t have changed it any. It’s set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic wasteland for no good reason.

Now I’m fine with artistic choices but at least have them be meaningful. Nowhere was any of it explained, nor did it make any difference whatsoever. It was like screenwriters Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai were trying to out-Cage Nicolas Cage and the rest of the cast was trying to go even bigger. While I think some of the name-recognizable cast were fine, Cage and Sofia Boutella, etc. were fine, some of the extras in the background spent their time mugging for the camera to such a degree that it make Cage’s performance seem sublime.

That was really where it lost me. I can handle a bizarre story so long as it’s done well, this just wasn’t. I went through the first half-hour of the movie completely lost, thinking “they’re  going to explain all of this, right?” Except they never did. Now this might appeal to a certain crowd but I’m absolutely not it and, judging by the kind of reviews that this movie is getting, neither is just about anyone else. According to Rotten Tomatoes, a site that I detest but it’s at least a fair metric, it’s got a 33% audience score at the moment. I mean, if you’re going to sit there for 100 minutes watching this thing, at least it ought to be entertaining and somewhat comprehensible, yet it isn’t and most critics have pointed that out. I don’t think this is just a movie with limited appeal, it’s just a mess.

I’m not sure there’s much more to say. Even on some of his recent movies like Willy’s Wonderland, I really enjoyed Cage’s performance but here… he just got lost behind the lunacy and the world, the world that was completely meaningless to the plot, overshadowed everything. I know Sono is known for making some crazy films but he really needed to turn this one down to 11. By the time they got out into the Ghostland, I had pretty much given up hope. I was hoping that it would all wind up meaning something in the end but it didn’t. It’s a hot mess of crazy crap thrown at the screen with no rhyme or reason and honestly, my time is worth more than that.

Give this one a miss. It’s just not very good.

Rating: 2 begrudging stars out of 5.