RSSReview: Blame the Director, Ghost Rider is Bad
Feb 18
Movies Comic Book Adaptation, Ghost Rider, Nicholas Cage Comments Off
Man, this movie was bad. I’m going to avoid (I swear) puns on the name of Ghost Rider or his alter ego Johnny Blaze and just say Man, this movie was bad!
While watching Ghost Rider, I got a weird sense of deja vu. It was very much the same feeling I had watching Daredevil, another Marvel comic book adaptation. Both films have some good action sequences, a hottie love interest for our superhero, and a nice mix of light and dark moments. But put those pieces altogether and both films were an unequivocal disaster from top to bottom. They are literally hard to sit through. You can almost (almost) spot the making of a good superhero movie in the finished product.
If you don’t know, Mark Steven Johnson was responsible for both movies, as both director and primary screenwriter. His other credits include Simon Birch, an impossibly mangled adaptation of one of the most spiritually uplifting novels of all time A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Jack Frost.
Ghost Rider has great visual imagery. The flaming skull and the transformation from human to hothead. The flaming motorcycle rides were the best scenes, causing senseless and extraordinary damage which is kind of what you would expect from a bike created from the flames of hell.
But aside from rare moments, the rest was a disaster. Okay, just to make this a proper review, here’s the plot: Mephistopheles (played by the cadaverous Peter Fonda) signs a blood contract with young Johnny Blaze (Matt Long) who grows up into Nicolas Cage. Mephistopheles eventually enlists the adult Johnny Blaze, haunted by twenty years of nightmares and Nicolas Cage-facial tics, to hunt down Blackheart (Wes Bentley, who also had an unfortunate role in American Beauty.) Problem, Cage, er, Blaze turns into Ghost Rider after dark and in the presence of evil which means he’ll never be able to take Eva Mendes, er, his love interest Roxanne Simpson, out on a date.
Oh wait, and then there’s the inexplicable appearance of Sam Elliott, playing the caretaker who knows all -- I won’t spoil the surprise for you but afterwards you will definitely think “where is he going?”
I really enjoyed Mendes in this movie, and I can honestly say I had no expectations because I have -- get this -- never seen another movie she was in.
And that is pretty much it. You know it’s a bad sign when you haven’t even gotten through the backstory and you’re already ready to leave. But on a positive note, I made it through this entire review without a single pun.
