Ghost Rider

Ah, comic book movies. Treat them too seriously and they devolve to mirthless, over-the-top grim spectacles of machismo and vengeance (see Sin City). Treat them with reverence but mistake what can translate into film with what can’t and you get Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider (2007), a thoroughly appalling piece of cinema that will make oodles because it requires no commitment and simply churns out empty thrills. Films have rarely been so slight as this one.

If one is unfamiliar, hot-shot carnie motorcycle stuntman Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) makes a deal with the devil (Peter Fonda) to save his father from the grips of cancer, a disease that has spread from the ills of cigarettes. Alas, while the father awakens and feels fine the next day, he just gets in a bike wreck the same day, proving that you might as well die from cigarettes as die from bike wrecks. Inane. Anyway, Johnny tries to spare the life of his childhood beloved (now Eva Mendes), a reporter, from the dangers of being too close to him.

Unfortunately, despite my hopeful anticipation that this would be beautifully bad, Ghost Rider instead mostly trails toward pointless mediocrity. All the things that gave the character an edge, the Penance Stare and the flaming skull, just don't translate dramatically to a feature film. Take a pile of melodrama, add horrendous music that cues us along, remove the top three buttons of Eva Mendes' shirts, and add mediocre CG that lacks any of the over-the-top absurdity that Cage has, and you're left with a film that divests itself of its greatest strength--a game Cage and Sam Elliot. The script sucks, though we all knew that, but the film lacks anything close to an interesting villain, with Bentley chewing the scenery and then some in vain, and the film is devoid of the energy and vitality that could make something like this appealing. Largely uninvolving and thoroughly rote filmmaking, I'll instead just forget this vacuous film ever happened and return to the madcap joy of the Wicker Man…

Ghost Rider: 3/10