Here is one of the silliest and goofiest movies to come along in many a moon. Ghost Rider is a movie that looks like the sketchbook drawings of a high school boy's artbook combined with an explosion at the special effects factory. Grotesque ghouls, flaming skeleton people, demons, souped up motorcycles that leave a trail of fire in their path, and the Devil are just some of the images the movie throws at its audience, not really slowing down to explain just what the heck it is that we're looking at. To it's credit, the movie doesn't even try to take itself seriously, and writer-director Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil) does try to give the film a light and slightly humorous feel to go along with the silliness of the plot itself. Unfortunately, the humor on display isn't very funny, and we find ourselves rolling our eyes more than laughing, and laughing when we're not supposed to be. Ghost Rider is a movie that seems to be going out of its way to be a lot of silly fun, but a key ingredient is missing, and that is a little bit of coherency to go along with the silliness.

Based on a Marvel Comics character from the early 70s, Ghost Rider tells the story of a motorcycle stuntman named Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage). And no, that's not a stage name, that's the guy's real name. With a name like Johnny Blaze, of course he's going to be a stuntman. Either that, or a porn star. Years ago, Johnny made a deal with the Devil, who turns out to be Peter Fonda. (I knew it all along!) The deal that was made was that Johnny would give the Devil his soul in order to save his father's life, who was dying of Cancer at the time. The deal was made, but what Johnny didn't know was that after his dad's Cancer was cured, the Devil would cause dear old dad to die in a stunt accident. The Devil promised he'd come back one day to collect on Johnny's half of the bargain. When the story finally kicks off, that day is today. Johnny finds out he's a mere pawn in the Devil's grand plan, and that he's now forced to work for him as some kind of Satanic bounty hunter called the Ghost Rider. Every night, Johnny now turns into a demonic biker with a flaming skull for a head, who literally looks like he walked off of some 1980s heavy metal record cover, and rides around on a super powered demonic motorcycle. The Devil charges Ghost Rider with the task to track down his demonic son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley, who is a long way from American Beauty here). It seems Blackheart has buddied up with a small group of slacker demons, and they're looking for some kind of scroll that holds so many evil souls that whoever possesses it could rule the world. With the Devil literally breathing down his neck to get the job done, Johnny has to find a way to live with his curse, and still try to lead a normal life during the day, especially since an old flame named Roxanne (Eva Mendes) is back in town.

At least that's the best I can gather as to what the plot was supposed to be. The point is, Ghost Rider is not a very story-driven movie. It is instead driven by special effects where CG demons and monsters lurk around every frame. The movie is so fast paced, and so content to throw as many special effects shots and motorcycle stunts as it can in its nearly two hour time frame that the audience is kind of left wondering what we're supposed to be looking at. As soon as Johnny Blaze becomes the Ghost Rider, the movie goes full tilt, not even bothering to explain his powers or what he's supposed to be. Johnny turns into the Rider, and then immediately races off to battle demons and street thugs. We get scenes where the Ghost Rider rides his bike up the side of skyscrapers, lassos helicopters with his magical chain-like weapon, speeds down streets on his bike, leaving a trail of fire behind him, and forces bad guys to look into his eyes so that they can see all of their past misdeeds. That last part particularly confused me. Ghost Rider seems to have the ability to peer deep into the souls of evil doers, and make them feel the pain of their past victims. The effect is pulled off by having the screen fill with CG fire, while a bunch of incoherent images and screaming flashes before our eyes. The movie then shows the villain having his eyes turn into a charred black substance, then the Ghost Rider drops them to the ground and walks away. Is the bad guy dead? What exactly just happened? What's with the eyeball thing? The movie never really explains. The fact that it doesn't make a lot of sense is curious, because the movie comes equipped with its own Narrator, a character who exists solely to explain the film's backstory and the history of Ghost Rider to Johnny and to the audience. The Narrator comes in the form of an old cemetery caretaker played by Sam Elliott. He has no real character, he simply exists to clue us in as to what all of this means in every scene he's in. He doesn't do a very good job, as I still felt sort of lost.

A superhero movie is only as good as its villain, and in this department, Ghost Rider comes up very short. The film's main villain, Blackheart, is largely uninteresting, and seems to only possess the ability to kill people by having their skin turn a sickly blueish-gray color, then fall over dead just by touching them. Did he steal their soul? Did he just give them a rare deadly skin disease? Once again, the movie never explains. It's disappointing that this seems to be his only power, since you'd think the son of the Devil would be a lot more powerful than that. If I was the son of Satan, and that was my only power, I'd be crying foul. He hangs out with a small group of demons who are equally disappointing, as they seem to be dispatched by the Ghost Rider in about a minute or less. If you're going to surround yourself with lackeys, surround yourself with ones that can at least last a minute in a fight when your dad sends a burning skull demon on a motorcycle after you. We never get to really know much about Blackheart's plan to begin with, other than the standard "I want to rule the world" excuse. The movie hints that there's some sort of father-son rivalry going on, but this is never really touched upon in any detail. With so many demons battling each other, there's bound to be some cool action sequences, right? If only wishing made it so. What we get are some highly anticlimactic sequences where Ghost Rider dispatches the bad guys without even breaking a sweat. The movie can't be forced to raise the tiniest bit of tension for its hero. The film sets up a number of action sequences that look like they could lead to something exciting, only to give us absolutely nothing. A scene where Johnny Blaze is thrown into prison and escapes as the Ghost Rider is strangely lacking in anything resembling excitement. He simply walks out of the prison with little to no opposition whatsoever, and doesn't even come across a police officer until he's already outside of the building. Not even the car chase scenes where the police try to chase down Ghost Rider with their cars can drum up much adrenalin. If you have a movie where your star is a demon with a flaming skull for a head, and you can't think of anything exciting to happen to him, your script has problems.

The scenes dealing with Johnny Blaze unfortunately do not hold up much better, since we never really learn much about the guy. He likes jellybeans, he's held a long-time flame for the girlfriend he was forced to walk away from after making the deal with the Devil, and that's about it. Nicholas Cage's performance doesn't really help attach us emotionally to the character, as his portrayal seems to be strangely subdued and indifferent, as if he doesn't care much about what's going on around him. I would say that he probably knew he was stuck with a bad script, but according to some reports, he actually worked as an uncredited ghost writer (no pun intended) on the script itself! Cage is apparently a big fan of the comic character, but none of this love shows through in his performance or in any of the scenes and dialogue he supposedly helped with. His character's relationship with Roxanne is equally uninspired. Eva Mendes is beautiful, but is stuck with a very shallow character who doesn't really play a large role in the story, other than to be kidnapped by Blackheart near the end. The screenplay obviously wants to try to portray Roxanne as an independent and smart woman, but it doesn't work, because we never learn anything about her other than that she's a reporter for a local news team. We never get a sense of the real relationship between the two, because they spend almost every scene together arguing or teasing each other, except for the climax where they battle the forces of darkness together. Ah, love. The only performance in the film that comes close to actually trying is Sam Elliott, and that's only because he's got a certain cool charm that he brings to his character. Pity that he only exists to tell us the story. If the character had been developed more, he could have been interesting.
Ghost Rider tries so hard to be cool. In fact, it tries too hard. You get the sense that Mark Steven Johnson was giggling uncontrollably as he wrote a lot of this stuff into the script, and probably had grand visions of this being one badass movie. Apparently, the studio had similar aspirations, as this was originally intended to be a big summer movie last year. Then it got pushed back to February of this year, which is never a good sign for a special effects movie. The studio claimed it got pushed back because the effects needed more work, and they wanted to add more of them. If this is so, then why does the Ghost Rider himself look about as convincing as a video game character? We never believe that he's a character, since he looks like a CG cartoon mixing with human actors. Ghost Rider could have been a lot of fun, but in the end, it just doesn't come together. We walk out unimpressed, wondering a whole bunch of questions, and thinking to ourselves that we just saw a whole lot of spirit and energy put into a whole lot of nothing.

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