Ghost Rider review by The Grim Ringler
It can’t be said I am not an optimist when it comes to movies. When the first trailers for Ghost Rider came out I thought they looked good. Sure, some of the CGI looked rough but darn it, the movie looked like it might be fun. Meanwhile, my friends thought the movie looked like utter crap. Bah, what did they know?
Johnny Blaze (Nic Cage
channeling the King) is the son of a motorcycle stuntman and learned his own
high flying ways from his old man. As a team working carnivals and low-rent
circuses, the duo is popular but not far beyond the tent. Johnny wants more. He
wants a life with his girlfriend, who is being sent away to keep her from
Johnny. On the eve of running away with his girl, Johnny finds out that his
father may not do so great on his own, as he’d hoped. Johnny finds a health
notice in the trash that reports that his father has cancer that is spreading
and suddenly, Johnny’s romantic escape isn’t so romantic anymore. AS he is
working on his motorcycle later that night a stranger appears to offer him a
deal – he’ll cure the boy’s father, in exchange for Johnny’s soul. Tricked into
signing this devil’s bargain, the deal is done and the next day daddy Blaze is
as good as new and ready for another day when tragedy strikes during a routine
stunt, taking the life of Johnny’s father and damning him to servitude for
Lucifer. Flash ahead and Johnny is a national sensation, doing stunts his
father never would have dreamed of and living his life as if he’s invincible.
Those around him are starting to doubt Johnny sanity after a particularly nasty
spill but the boss insists he knows what he’s doing, daring death but always
being saved by the intervention of a dark spirit. After a chance re-uniting
with his youthful love, Johnny is set to work off his debt to Lucifer, his task
being to hunt down and destroy four renegade demons that have a secret agenda
with the devil. Damned to go through with the deal, Johnny changes every
evening when he is near evil, his body setting alight and head and hands
becoming skeletal as he hunts down souls for Satan. What Johnny wants more than
anything is to be free of this curse, of his duty to Satan, and to have a
second chance at life, but to do it he
must trust in another stranger who knows more than he lets on, and who
may well know a way to end the curse once and for all.
It’s a shame that comic book adaptations get such a bad
rap because there are some very well made, very imaginative films…alas, this is not one of those. I think the problem began
with the comic itself. Some things are just not made for transference. This is
one of those projects that just don’t translate. It becomes corny and cheesy
when it’s made into a live-action film. Had this been an animated film, it
might have worked, here, not so much. This isn’t a character people generally
know, not one that people have a connection to, and this isn’t a character with
terribly memorable villains. Which says a lot. When
you can’t even make the devil (ridiculously called MEPHISTOPHELES here) a good villain you’re in trouble. I would
imagine that the draw here was that you can start new, with not a lot of baggage
being that the character never has been seen much before. The thing is too, the
film Daredevil worked for me because
it was so energetic and just was what it was. Here, they’re trying to make an
interesting character out of, well, a skeleton with sass. Not as compelling as
a blind man fighting evil. Now, most fanboys LOATHE Daredevil, and so be it, but what I say
is that DD worked as a film, maybe not as an adaptation, but it worked as a
film. Ghost Rider just doesn’t.
Johnny Blaze is a character we need to connect with and we just don’t. You meet him as a teen and
the kid that plays him doesn’t look a THING like Cage. Not a thing. The character never really has any real moments
either. We get glimpses of a man beneath the bravado of the stunt-rider, but we
never really care about him or are invested in him, something that’s pivotal if
you are to feel anything for him when he becomes the Ghost Rider. And yes, the Rider. They have tried to give him a personality
but it just doesn’t work. Sometimes he’s funny (or what the filmmakers thought
would be funny) and other times he comes off as a creepy spirit of vengeance.
Had they played up the creepy aspect then maybe it’d have worked. You will feel
for Blaze as you do for a character beset by a werewolf’s bite because both
will become monsters and cannot stop it. Worse than Johnny and
the Rider though are the villains.
The devil is bland and far
from menacing. He, like the other demons in the film, are not allowed to be
creepy but are dressed like lame vampires from some nineties film and then they
have some ridiculous ‘scary’ special effects overlaid to show that, AHHH, they
are really monsters beneath their human facades. Yawn. There is a moment early
on where you see the devil’s shadow behind him and that worked because it’s genuinely creepy, the CGI are just silly.
What writing there is is
dreadful. You get the usual cheesy action movie lines, under-developed
characters, and honestly, there just isn’t a story here that you really give a
damn about. A large part of that is that there is so little flesh given to
these characters that the devil is little more than a carnie, the demons are a
mimic of awful vampire villains, and the hero and his plight are never full
realized. There direction is fine, but too many cutesy tricks and angles take
you out of the moment, and the music is simply awful.
The hell of all of it is that there’s a decent movie
here, buried beneath it all. Ghost Rider is an interesting character of
vengeance. Eva Mendes, while not
great, does well with what she has to work with and heck, the sidekick
character is shamefully underutilized. They were trying to do too much here and
it just didn’t work. I think if they can focus on the initial curse, the cost
of the curse and then what that curse means, I think you have an interesting
story. Keep it simple. In a second film you can worry about bringing in all
sorts of villains and all that, but for the first film, it’s just confusing and
ends up saying and meaning nothing.
This film won’t kill the trend of comic adaptations but
we’ll hope that



3 out of 10 Jackasses blog comments powered by Disqus