Ghost Rider

Posted by Greg

February 28, 2008

Dull and Crossbones

* out of *****

Wow. I barely know where to begin.

When I was a wee lad (okay, in High School), I used to walk 30 minutes out of my way once a month to pick up the latest Ghost Rider comic at my friendly neighbourhood comic book store. My Ghost Rider was actually the second incarnation of a character that debuted in 1972, updated for a new generation, although love of the second got me reading the first. The character was raw and pure; the spirit of vengeance, forced by Lucifer to exist in the earthly plane. His human host was constantly in battle with his possessor, who turned him from a victimized young man into a badass satanic bounty hunter when evil drew near. I really, really wanted the movie to be the party that rocked the party, but it saddens me to say that it’s the first movie in a long time that I just wanted to end so I could go home.

A morose-looking Nicolas Cage is Johnny Blaze, world’s greatest motorcycle stuntman. After making a deal with the devil (Peter Fonda) as a boy to save his Dad from cancer, Blaze finds himself nearly death-proof, his deal keeping him out of harm’s way. But he’s bored and reckless, constantly frustrating his crew chief (Donal Logue) with insane stunts and seeming disregard for his own life. But when demon Blackheart (Wes Bentley) shows up with three sidekicks to claim an ancient scroll, Satan calls upon Blaze - as the Ghost Rider - to track down Blackheart and eliminate him before he gets the scroll.

Five minutes in, my eyes were rolling out of their sockets. Fantastically bad dialogue and inept, vanilla direction practically leap off the screen and beat you with the mediocre stick. Writer/director Mark Steven Johnson (Elektra, Daredevil) really dropped the ball on this one, but working from his Swiss-cheese script that lacked even a shred of consistency, I don’t really know what he could do. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and I’m not saying I could do any better, but I don’t know who gave him 100 million dollars to make this.

It’s quite startling, actually - almost every single directing decision he makes seems wrong, from shot composition (clichéd is too kind a word) to character motivation; his coverage is bad and the editing choppy as a result. Logic is totally lacking in any decision any character makes (after finding Blaze’s burned license plate at a Ghost Rider crime scene, the police surround his house, point their guns at his face, arrest him, accuse him of a murder in another city and throw him in jail). The ‘humour’ is lame and juvenile at best (Blaze turns on the TV and immediately starts laughing out loud at a chimpanzee doing karate). Random scenes exist for seemingly no reason (Blackheart walks into a biker bar in the middle of nowhere and kills everyone - then leaves). In one scene, Ghost Rider is stabbed, requiring Blaze to have stitches; in the next, Ghost Rider is pounded by SWAT machine guns, but Blaze is fine). The music sounds like something out of an 80’s Bon Jovi song, too, with a heavy metal guitar riff accompanying each bad character whenever they pose for the camera - even the way the characters stand is unnatural. It drove me nuts.

Acting wise, I guess Cage is okay - in real life, he’s a huge Ghost Rider fan (he even has a GR tattoo) - but I was always conscious of the fact that I was watching Nicolas Cage; the character wasn’t developed well enough for anything else.

Eva Mendes is thrown into the mix as the obligatory girl-who-gets-kidnapped-by-the-bad-guy. She was completely wasted here and worse, managed to be dressed in the blandest wardrobe I’ve ever seen; I never thought I’d find her merely average looking, but I was proven wrong.

Blackheart and his posse managed to be about as threatening as a ficus in a windstorm; they look like grumpy extras from a Trent Reznor/NIN video. They’re escaped demons from hell, at least make them a little bit scary! In the vein of great videogames like Super Mario Brothers and Kung Fu, each one is like a ‘mini-boss’ that is dispatched on our hero’s rise to get the master, but each showdown is really, truly, pathetically limp and short.

I could continue on and on with what was wrong with the movie. What was right? Umm, the special effects were mostly okay, but considering they’ve been working on them for two years, that’s not such a big deal. It was kind of cool to see the Rider on screen, as he is a visually striking character, but he was a visually striking character when he was just a drawing too. Johnny Blaze had a cool apartment.

If you’re standards are low - really low - you might not mind it as goofy entertainment, which is why I’m giving it one star. If I was grading it purely as a geek on the merit of it paying respect to the source material… well, the Movieseer rating scale doesn’t go into the negatives, so I plead the fifth. A reviewer on the movie mega-site aintitcool.com said it best: “It’s like running up a hill to smell a bucket of s**t.”

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