Compared to the succession of tedious action thrillers he’d been pumping out for the better part of a decade, Nicolas Cage has been on a hell of a roll over the last couple of years. In fact, if his next few releases live up to their undoubted potential, then we could be talking about the actor’s hottest streak since the mid-90s when he delivered the phenomenal quartet of Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off one after the other.
Sure, there have been a couple of stinkers along the way like The Humanity Bureau, Running with the Devil and Kill Chain, but since 2018 the Academy Award winner has appeared in acclaimed animations Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, psychological mindf*cks Mandy and Color Out of Space, tongue in cheek amusement park slasher Willy’s Wonderland and Pig, which is the best-reviewed live-action film of his entire career.
Next up is supernatural thriller Prisoners of the Ghostland, which arrives on September 17th, and as you can see from the latest trailer, this thing looks positively insane. Cage stars as a bank robber named Hero who gets broken out of jail in a place called Samurai Town by an evil governor, whose adopted granddaughter has been kidnapped and taken to an alternate dimension.
Strapped into a leather jumpsuit riddled with explosive that detonates in five days, Hero sets out to find the damsel in distress and clearly encounters all sorts of wild and crazy sh*t along the way. Prisoners of the Ghostland premiered on the festival circuit earlier this year and drew strong reviews, and all of them say the same thing: It provides Cage Rage at its finest.