Thanks to his status as a living, breathing meme generator, audiences have come to expect certain things from Nicolas Cage movies. For a long time, it looked as if they weren’t going to get them, though, with the actor showing up in a constant stream of po-faced and self-serious action thrillers that often had him in uncharacteristically reserved form.
However, the shackles have been well and truly thrown off, and in the next couple of months alone we’re going to see a trio of what could be his craziest movies ever. Willy’s Wonderland is released on VOD this Friday, and finds the Academy Award winner trapped in an amusement park where the animatronic residents have come to life in order to kill him, while in March he’ll play a fictionalized version of himself dealing with birthday parties, drug cartels and the CIA in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Meanwhile, director Sion Sono’s bonkers crime thriller Prisoners of the Ghostland recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the early reactions have been pretty enthusiastic, with critics praising the leading man’s unhinged performance and the visual style of the pic, which blends multiple different genres together to create something completely unique. Some have even deemed it the craziest movie of Cage’s career, and in a new interview, Sono admitted that he wears that as a badge of honor.
“Well, my favorite Nic Cage film is Wild at Heart, so I would think Wild at Heart would be the wildest film for Nic Cage. But if people, or Nic Cage, consider this movie to be the absolute wildest, then that’s such an honor.”
Prisoners of the Ghostland stars Cage as a criminal who happens to be named Hero, and he’s forced into rescuing a woman that’s been abducted and taken to a supernatural universe where he must break an evil curse that binds them together in order to save her, all with explosives strapped to various parts of his body including the testicles – so crazy might be an understatement.