Ghost Rider

I never really considered Ghost Rider to be a superhero, but he is a comic book character in the Marvel universe, and they have now made two movies, so I guess this blog would be incomplete without it. Ghost Rider came out in 2007, starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Peter Fonda, and was directed by Mark Steven Johnson. Interesting backstory: This movie was originally planned in 2001, with Johnny Depp considered to play the lead. Nicolas Cage, though, is a big comic book fan — he paid $2 million for a copy of Action Comics #1 and was going to star in Tim Burton's Superman movie that obviously was never made. Cage eventually beat out Depp for the part, but then had to wait four to five years until they finally started making the movie. So, enough with that and on to my review.

The beginning of the movie was very fast and a little too neat. Everything fell together in the tried and true Hollywood way just like you'd expect it to. The stiff acting combined with the cliche script ensured that this movie was going to be a poor piece of cinematography. But one part I really couldn't understand in the beginning was when Johnny's dad died. Why wasn't Johnny performing with him? We already saw the two of doing stunts together, so why on this day did Johnny decide not to perform? The movie didn't gain anything by holding him back, and, if anything, just made it feel unnatural to have him standing on the side in street clothes. I'll have to dock a point for that.

I will, however, raise the score back to an average 5 for the inclusion of a ZZ Top song. I'm a big ZZ Top fan, so their inclusion here won me over. In fact, all the songs they included here fit the mood well and were pretty good songs in their own right. I'm just a sucker for classic rock, I guess. Now, would it surprise you if that was the only positive thing I had to say about this movie?

My next complaint involves the mandatory and useless girlfriend. Dang, I can't even remember her name, and I just watched this movie! Let me check ... oh, Roxanne. What a weird name. Anyway, Roxanne and Johnny have an annoying push-pull dynamic throughout the whole movie, but I felt Roxanne's actions were more inexcusable, especially the really random and really awkward interview. First of all, why did she drive out all that way to interview Johnny and then not stick around for the jump. The story is the jump! I'm a journalist, so I get especially critical when I see poor journalism techniques in film. But seriously, Roxanne should be fired for traveling a long distance to cover an event and not getting any shots from said event. Instead, all she got was an unusable 30-second interview with the stuntman. She asked bad questions, Johnny didn't even answer those questions, and when he did talk, he mumbled so much you couldn't even understand him. And Roxanne thinks she can edit that into some kind of package without any footage of him jumping over six helicopters on a football field (utterly ridiculous, by the way). Dump her, Johnny! She's not worth it!

The score fell to a 3 when Johnny first turned into Ghost Rider and was immediately attacked by Blackheart and his elemental demon sidekicks. Right before he kills the first one, the demon begs for mercy and Ghost Rider says, "Sorry, all outta mercy!" What? Seriously, what is going on? So demons can be killed, OK, I get that, but Johnny sold his soul to the devil, so shouldn't he be working with demons? Now the devil, Mephistopheles, is using Ghost Rider to take down his rebellious son, Blackheart. All right, I guess I can understand that, but I thought Ghost Rider was supposed to be a hero. But he has no mercy. And he's only taking down some demons to further advance the causes of the father of all demons. This paradoxical nature is the biggest problem of Ghost Rider. Some kids can simply say, "Cool! His head is a flaming skull!" But I find myself caught in a moral/ethical debate of the heroic nature of this character, and I simply can't resolve it. Maybe somebody can explain to me how Ghost Rider can still be a good guy when he works for the devil. The movie sure didn't explain it well enough for me. Even at the end, when he leaves the devil's service, he still has powers that originated from him. So how can he be a hero?

Well, we did see one instance of Ghost Rider saving an innocent person being attacked by a non-demon bad guy. However, this was done in such a goofy way, I actually laughed out loud. Ghost Rider makes a big entrance, making the robber stop. He kind of tilts his head to the side, and the girl leaves, saying, "Thanks." like it's perfectly normal to be saved from a mugging by a man with a flaming skull for a head. The robber freaked out like a normal person would to see a flaming skull, but this girl ... couldn't she at least look a little surprised? Then again, this is the Marvel universe, so I guess she may have already run-ins with the X-Men and Fantastic Four. (Note: This is not true. None of these movies exist in the same universe.)

Now, all of Ghost Rider's fights with the elemental demons were pretty unsatisfactory, but the one with the wind one was the worst. He tries to grab the wind demon, but he slips through his arms and floats in mid-air for about a minute and says, "You can't catch the wind." He then continues to sit there in the same spot and watches as Ghost Rider slowly spins his chain around to ... suck the demon up, I guess. You know what, that fight really did suck.

The score of the movie falls to an irredeemable zero for one pointless look-at-our-CGI scene. The old Ghost Rider calls up his horse and rides with the new Ghost Rider to the scene of the final battle with Blackheart. And this was actually pretty cool-looking, although it didn't make sense for two Ghost Riders to exist at the same time (at the end, it's implied that one person always has to have the curse). But then, the old Ghost Rider just leaves after the ride. He said he could only transform one more time and he was saving it for that ride. What? Ghost Riders can only transform a set amount of times? And why didn't this old man save his "Ghost Rider juice" to help Johnny fight Blackheart. I mean, this demon just got a contract for 1,000 souls, which is apparently very bad, so shouldn't old man Ghost Rider do everything he could to help the new kid?

At this point, I completely checked out of the movie (I held on for a long time!) and I didn't even care how weird it was that he needed to stand in the shadows to use his powers or that 1,000-soul contract never seemed like that big of a deal. I did, however, laugh again when Blackheart said, "My name is LEEEEE-gion, (pause) for we are (pause) MAAAAA-ny." Wes Bentley had lots of overly-long pauses in many of his lines, but this one, combined with the drawn-out syllables, was utterly ridiculous.

Nowadays, it seems perplexing that anyone would want to make a Ghost Rider movie, but there really was a time not too long ago that Ghost Rider was more popular than Iron Man. Back in the '90s, Marvel was going bankrupt, so they sold off the movie rights of all their popular characters — most notably Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil. Although it took a while to get off the ground, Ghost Rider was made with a budget of $110 million and earned almost $230 million, which was enough to warrant a sequel. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance came out in 2012 with a budget of only $57 million, but it did earn $130 million. (I guess I'll have to watch that.) Recently, the Ghost Rider movie rights have reverted back to Marvel, so technically, they could use the character in the next Avengers movie, although I seriously doubt that would happen. Ghost Rider has never really felt part of the Marvel universe, and he's a very difficult character to pull off well in a major movie. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be extremely tricky.

Final score: 0