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Rated PG-13
Directed by Mark Steven Johnson
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
I am somewhat well-versed in comic lore, but the one of the ones I never got into was GHOST RIDER. In fact, for a couple of my pre-teen years, I didn’t know GHOST RIDER was even a superhero. I thought he was just a tattoo that every biker in America had. When I found out he sprung up in the pages of Marvel Comics in the Seventies Post-EXORCIST Satan-Boom, I was less than impressed. You know you’re out of ideas for comic protagonists when they aggressively market a hero whose sole distinction is that his head is on fire.
But if you start digging from the bottom comics drawer, you eventually get bottom drawer movies as well. At this rate, we’ll be seeing a Marcus Nispel helmed adaptation of QUASAR sometime soon. So yes, GHOST RIDER is a bad movie, but I’m not really mad at it. I haven’t seen a movie this eager to entertain with such limited resources since last year’s SEE NO EVIL. They’re both like puppies. But while the former was cute and fun to play with, GHOST RIDER pinched off a deuce in my shoe.
Nicolas Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a stunt-motorcyclist who made a deal with the Devil (Peter Fonda) to save his dad from lung cancer. What does Ol’ Scratch get in return? Johnny’s services as the Ghost Rider; Hell’s bounty hunter who roams the earth picking up his soul-tabs for him. The tools of “The Rider” include a flaming chain and a motorcycle that apparently has Mount St. Helens for an engine, what with the smoke and flames coming out of it and all.
So by night, Johnny is Ghost Rider. By day he’s… A whiny little bitch. He doesn’t drink, eats jelly-beans, constantly pines for his lost childhood love Roxanne (Eva Mendes) and listens to The Carpenters… THE FUCKING CARPENTERS! I’m not asking every superhero has to be Billy Bad-Ass. Just the ones with flaming skulls. He even has this power where he shows the guilty the effect of what they’ve done to the innocent. This doesn’t seem like “Hell’s Bounty Hunter” so much as “MacGruff: The Crime Demon.”
Oh, and the creepy kid from AMERICAN BEAUTY plays the son of Satan, bent on taking over the world. The guy is so cardboard I actually made a point of not remembering his name.
Nicolas Cage looks and sounds like we caught him just waking up in every scene he’s in. For an actor who a lot of the time overacts like his head is on fire, he picks the movie where his head is ACTUALLY on fire to finally show restraint. He’s like Alex Rodriguez in a way; He’s great in little movies like MATCHSTICK MEN and LORD OF WAR, but get him in a game that matters and he chokes like a dwarf going down on Ron Jeremy.
Eva Mendes, with her perfromance, bring–Ohhhhhhh, who cares? I’m surprised she keeps getting work and judging from the constant look of pouty confusion hammered onto her skull, she is as well.
And then we have Peter Fonda whose very presence is a visual gag. He’s in a Marvel Comics movie about a dude on a motorcycle when he played a guy named “Captain America” in EASY RIDER. Funny a sixties Pot-Icon. Something tells me the cloud of smoke he appears out of didn’t come from brimstone.
An hour and forty minutes of bad special effects, thin characters, boring dialogue and then it’s over. It’s painless and might be a little bit of juvenile fun, but when I’ve become accustomed to great Superhero flicks like BATMAN BEGINS and SPIDER-MAN 2, I want less sizzle and more steak. It started out great when fans of the comics were making the movies but like all good things, a cheap buck becomes more valuable than a good and expensive memory. The business of Geek Entertainment on this level is getting more and more corrupt, full of sound and fury and signifying… The beginning of the end.
So let’s put down the superheroes, huh? Let’s pick up the Graphic Novels. Robert Rodriguez got us off to a good start a couple of years ago with FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY and Zack Snyder’s gonna keep the party rolling with his next couple of pictures. Superheroes outside of the sequels to the good ones are, dare I say it, at an end. But don’t think of it as death. Think of it as the next step in evolution.
As long as Joel Schumacher doesn’t get anymore funny ideas abou THE SANDMAN, we’ll be fine.
2 out of 4
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