Cast
Nicolas Cage (Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider)
Eva Mendes (Roxanne Simpson)
Sam Elliott (Caretaker)
Wes Bentley (Blackheart)
Peter Fonda (Mephistopheles)
Donal Logue (Mack)

I could start out my reivew by making a crack about how the road to hell is paved with flaming motorcycles tracks, but I find such comedic comparisons beneath me. Besides, the other reviewers have probably already used all of them.

From the same director who brought you the astoundingly not-very-good Daredevil a few Februarys past comes another film adaptation of a second tier Marvel Comics character. To be fair, Ghost Rider did have a strong following in 1970s when Marvel was experimenting with characters outside of spandex-suited heroes, and a recent mini-series written by Garth Ennis (of Punisher and Preacher fame) proved exceptional. But Mark Steven Johnson’s big screen take on “The Most Supernatural Superhero of All!” is an anemic affair, and just what you might expect from a February release. Some cool casting ideas aside (Nic Cage as Inferno-Elvis; Peter Fonda playing up his old Easy Rider image), what we end up with isn’t as pulpishly thrilling or enjoyably cheesy as it needed to be.

The screenplay, also by Johnson and desperate for a re-write from a genuine comic book scribe, mixes the various ret-cons of the character over the years to deliver a straightforward Faustian origin. Teenage stunt cyclist Johnny Blaze (played by Matt Long) makes a deal with Mephistopheles for his soul in exchange for saving his father from cancer. Like any proper Faust-wannabe, Johnny fails to read the fine print, so his dad recovers from cancer only to eat it in a fiery stunt jump. Johnny drives off into the sunset, leaving behind all love and hope because Hell owns his soul.

Johnny Blaze grows up into Nicolas Cage with a hairpiece. Blaze has achieved redneck fame as a daredevil stunt jumper who cheats death over and over again. The movie never addresses how Johnny Blaze achieved such popularity, since he apparently crashes and burns repeatedly. I don’t know about you, but I think a stuntman’s popularity would rest on occasionally making a stunt rather than just the ability to recover from not making one. But I’m not a motorcycle stuntman, so what do I know? To mark Blaze as not just another leather-clad hick, Cage plays him as listening to the Carpenters, guffawing at videos of apes practicing ju-jitsu, and eating jelly beans from a martini glass. I didn’t make any of that up.

Mephistopheles shows up to collect his due: Johnny must ride as his servant, the Ghost Rider, and stop Blackheart (a Devil Jr. played by Wes Bentley in mime make-up) from getting his claws on a valuable soul contract that will lay the Earth waste, or at least raise Dallas property values. (The script doesn’t bother making the consequences clear.) Blaze’s skin burns off, his head turns into a torch, and his hog gets the Motley Crue make-over so he can face Blackheart and his minions. But his sporadic transformations into the flaming Deadhead play hell on his renewed relationship with his childhood girlfriend, Roxanne (Mendes). His one ray of hope is a crusty old caretaker in a cemetery, who could be played by no one else than Sam Elliott, a genuine modern Western talent in an artificial modern Western. 

Ghost Rider looks like he zoomed off a rejected cover concept for Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell and rips through a wasted Weird West landscape that melds Georgia O’Keefe with Hieronymous Bosch, but the PG-13 rating used to maximize profits keeps the film from ever getting really bull-dog mean—and that’s a hefty problem for a fetishistic “Biker from Hell” story. Ghosty never lays down the hurt, and the confrontations with Blackheart’s demons are too short. Mysteriously, Ghost Rider spends more time off his hog than on it; the movie never offers the audience an awesome wheeled chase scene, and only does something groovy with the cycle when Blaze rips up the side of skyscraper for no reason other than to give a kick to the trailer. The final face-off with Blackheart occurs in a terrific Western gothic set, but it’s an underwhelming and under-logical climax.

The action still promises to turn the movie into an enjoyable time-killer, which you can’t say for the “drama” in between. Cage hams it up with his Elvis obsession, but the script doesn’t give his kooky behavior much of a chance. Mendes is hopeless as the love interest, aside from a believable vapidity as a news anchor. The costume department tries to make up for her with ludicrous décolletage-enhancing tops. The sequences between Cage and Mendes grind the film to a halt with their limp dialogue and lack of directorial enthusiasm. The same lethargy fills scenes with pseudo-comic relief Donal Logue as Johnny Blaze’s non-wisecracking buddy. Adding to the malaise in these city-bound scenes is the city itself. Supposedly a metro somewhere in Texas, the anonymity of the Melbourne location puts a ugly dent in the hellish Southwestern aura that appears elsewhere. Comic book films at the very least need a consistent tone, and Ghost Rider swerves lazily between a leather-clad hellspawn graphic novel and a police drama set in suburban Australia.

I’ll give composer Christopher Young some credit for smoothing out the inconsistencies with his score and production designer Krik M. Petruccelli for the infernal Western vistas, but then the road to hell is paved with…

Oh look, I said I wasn’t going to do that, okay?