Ghost Rider

Is Ghost Rider the worst comic book movie ever made? Not at all. There are plenty of films far more worthy of universal revile. Ghost Rider is full of tantalizingly fantastic concepts, that are almost utterly ruined by a lot of horrendous execution. Though parts of it land in the 'So Awful It's Hilarious' category.

The movie begins with a very awkward introductory scene in Johnny Blaze's childhood, in which he makes a deal with the devil (Mephistopheles) to save his father from cancer, even though he plans to run away with his girlfriend because her father doesn't approve of her dating a carney; Johnny and his father both motorcycle stuntmen in a local carnival. In this entire scene, I found it incredibly difficult to really feel anything for these characters. The pacing was slapdashed together, and the conflicts were so wooden and forced. It was an utterly miserable traipse through a menagerie of badly executed cliches. Or rather, it would've been had it not been for one thing. Peter Fonda.

Throughout the film, every single best scene can be boiled down to 'It involved Peter Fonda.' Peter Fonda plays Mephistopheles, the aforementioned devil with whom young Johnny Blaze makes a deal with. Fonda plays a perfect Lucifer type figure, his every drip of dialogue clearly delivered by a snake's tongue. His completely untrustworthy nature made it hard to tell which things he really meant, and his every move seemingly unpredictable. He doesn't actually do a whole lot to drive the movie past the intro, but god dammit does he nail every single scene he's in with his unnerving snakelike presence.

Side note, a movie entirely about motorcycles and the devil is Peter Fonda, star of Easy Rider? BRILLIANT. And remind me again, what was the name of Fonda's character in Easy Rider? Captain Marvel. Double brilliant.

There is one other problem with the beginning in that Mephistopheles' logic isn't quite sound. He wants Johnny Blaze to one day be his Ghost Rider, but he kills his dad with a stunt accident right after curing his cancer because he would 'Get between them.' Except, his dad was a stuntman, raising Johnny in his footsteps, wouldn't that HELP him become a better Ghost Rider? Kill his girlfriend instead because she was the one who was tempting him to leave the carney life. But Mephistopheles killing his dad was a fantastic display of his ironic brand of dickish evil. It's a no win situation.

And it's not the last. When young Johnny Blaze grows up into Nicholas Cage, the first thing we see is him performing a stunt, and recalling his devil deal. It makes you believe he really dies in that first stunt, to rise as the Ghost Rider, only to have him surprisingly survive. I would've thought the memory would've been buried deeper, only recalled just before his transformation, and AFTER we've gotten to know Nicholas Cage. But it did make me truly believe his early death. Another no win situation.

After that, Nicholas Cage begins to deliver what I foolishly thought was a staggeringly brilliant performance. See, after Mephistopheles explained why he killed Johnny's father, he alluded that he was draining away his humanity, or essentially his empathy. Making him into a genuine sociopath. Not necessarily a murdering psychopath, but a men detached from general human emotion and social connections. And in that regard, Cage has several scenes where he completely nails that sense. I gathered such an eerie emptiness to his self. Not devoid of joy and laughter, but of any true connection with other human beings. Then he devastates it by being intensely introspective and 'soul-searchy.' And when his former flame showed up, I realized I was witnessing brilliance that was completely unintentional, as he makes painfully awkward attempts to woo her over once again. Not to mention that her reemergence into the story is far too convenient to be believable, and she tries to play it up as the most casual thing ever. And Nick Cage gets more emotional and just stomps my optimistic opinions of his acting in this movie into the ground.

But Cage looks like Fonda compared to the movie's primary antagonist, Darkheart, Mephistopheles' son. Darkheart is just awful. I wanted to like him for a split second because his sideburns reminded me of Travis Touchdown of No More Heroes, a phenomenal character. He instantly comes across as some kind of amazingly worse clone of Twilight's Edward, even though this film predates the Twilight films. I think he was trying to be cold and detached as I had thought Cage was attempting, but he completely fails it on every level. He occasionally comes across as a whiney emo brat throwing a tantrum at his father, but when he's not doing that, he's giving a performance that's the worst blend of cliche and forced. Literally none of his lines are remotely believable, spouted off with a bizarre sense of overdramatic, yet of little importance. He's just terrible, and we have to spend so much of the film watching him blandly ponce about with his cheesy demeanor.

His lackeys, fallen angels, all make much better and varied performances, but they get little to no screen time to develop anything resembling personalities, instead forced to be cookie cutter secondary threats, though again, varied amongst themselves, and more entertaining to watch than Darkheart. And while the methods by which they're taken down do have an interesting variety and uniqueness, none of the fight scenes last long enough to be engaging.

The cinematography is perfectly fine at times, but dramatic scenes use a ton of cheesy effects to ruin the potency. Sometimes smash cuts are used in rapid succession, other times comedic zooms are used in an attempt to create tension but instead break it, and the notable first transformation from Cage to Rider is drawn out far too long, and spends what felt like a full five minutes spinning around Cage to the point of almost nausea. And on the note of cheesiness, the movie literally grabs every low hanging fruit to make cringe worthy jokes, most of which are even worse when they show you them coming a mile away, drawing out the cringe.

But back to Cage becoming Rider. The first time Cage becomes the Ghost Rider, he's like a whole different person. Ghost Rider seems to immediately know what's going on, how to fight, and who to kill. No attempt is made to rationalize any of this, or even have Cage question it until he wakes up the next day. Through the entire movie, no more attempts are made to rationalize this, or create any kind of distinction that Cage and Rider are two personalities or not. Eventually Cage begins to learn how to control it, but it still never explains why the Rider was so efficient and knowledgeable before Cage could control himself.

And then there's the cops. Ghost Rider takes a few scenes to specifically not kill innocent people. He has a few with the cops, but when he was cornered, couldn't they emphasize his moral ambiguity by having him kill SOME cops? It's a good idea, not all policemen are innocent, it'd be a nice juicy moral issue to chew on to try and wash over the rest of the filth. But the cops question and detain Blaze after they find, of all things, his license plate amidst a destroyed road. There were HUNDREDS of devastated vehicles along that road. They find just his license plate and that's enough evidence to detain him and question him with an enthusiastic certainty? I call BS! Why would they assume he did it, instead of even considering maybe his bike was one of the TONS of vehicles destroyed.

And then there's a whole subplot where Ghost Rider is given exposition by 'Gravedigger' about Darkheart's search for the MacGuffin, an old contract the previous Ghost Rider kept from Mephistopheles, Cage oblivious to the blatantly obvious fact that Gravedigger IS the previous Ghost Rider. There's a scene towards the end where they ride together towards the final battle, and RIGHT before they get there, Gravedigger hands Rider a shotgun, and tells him he only had one transformation left, and he wanted to use it for a noble cause. What the hell noble cause did he serve? He didn't help Cage out ONE SINGLE BIT by transforming to ride with him. Why not ride normally a bit, then transform so you can maybe ACTUALLY HEP OUT ONE IOTA IN THE FINAL BATTLE? Or I'd forgive him if he just wanted 'One last ride,' IF ONLY HE SAID THAT INSTEAD OF WANTING TO HELP.

And why was Gravedigger's Ghost Rider voice the same as his normal voice when Blaze's Ghost Rider voice was not Nick Cage, but some awful cheesy monstery voice?

Aside from Fonda's glorious Mephistopheles, there are a handful of other good things. A lot of the action scenes are pretty epic, especially the ones involving GR against normal people. The special effects are actually pretty effective. The secret to where the MacGuffin was hidden had some nice layers of psychological trickery. And the idea of Darkheart becoming Legion in the end.

In Conclusion: 2/5

Peter Fonda, Gravedigger, and Legion can't carry a movie alone though. Wes Bentley made a completely horrendous villain for the movie, and that alone dragged things down a lot. But he couldn't kill the movie himself either. He had help from the piss poor blandness of Johnny Blaze, after a seeming attempt to make him interesting, once you realize he had a personality all along, the creepy detached nature appears to be just slip ups of bad acting. And then there was just some writing that fluctuated in quality. The overall story of the film is pretty good, but some key scenes were written and/or executed with such spectacular failure, that pretty much the best way to actually enjoy this film is to marvel at how bad it is, when it was almost half decent.