Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)

Sion Sono's first English-language production arrives wearing its influences like a borrowed coat, and the coat is loud. A bank robber named Hero is sprung from a cell, strapped into a leather suit rigged to detonate, and dispatched into a nuclear-scarred wasteland to recover the adopted granddaughter of a warlord who has fused the old West and feudal Japan into a single garish fever dream. The film is a co-production with a Japanese creative spine and a Japanese supporting cast of real substance, though the multiculturalism here reads as geography, not agenda. Algeria-born Sofia Boutella stands beside Nicolas Cage, and nobody in the frame pauses to explain it. That is the honest way to assemble a cast, and it earns a modest nod.

Beneath the kabuki and the miniguns, the politics are exploitative and proud of it. The Governor keeps a harem of adopted granddaughters, and the women eventually answer with gunfire, Bernice putting a bullet in the despot while Susie rakes his guards with a minigun. Revenge is served, though the film's investment is in velocity, not in a thesis about liberation. The irradiated outcasts rise against their rich overseer, which gestures toward class resentment, and the nuclear spill that made the Ghostland lends the imagery an environmental hue. Neither thread is argued. They are texture, styled for the frame.

Where the film proves most useful for our purposes is in what it declines to do. It does not lecture. There is no sermon tucked inside the leather suit, no moral delivered with a straight face, no instruction offered to a paying audience. The mutants are monsters, the trauma is trauma, the history is invented wholesale. This is a movie that wants to be strange and succeeds unevenly. A curiosity, then. Loud, bloody, and blessedly free of homily.