Apparently Hollywood plans on adapting every comic book ever put to ink. (I think some of the guys from The Cavalier Daily's Comics page are in early talks with Miramax.) Not that I have a major problem seeing so many of my childhood idols grace the screen, but whenever a market is flooded with a particular brand of product there's bound to be some low quality runoff. Case in point: Ghost Rider.
The film opens on a young Johnny Blaze (played by Matt Long, a pretty-boy who looks absolutely nothing like Nicholas Cage). Blaze and his father work at their local circus as motorcycle stuntmen. Unfortunately Daddy Blaze smokes cigarettes like a maniac and gets lung cancer. This prompts young Blaze to sell his soul to a Mephistopheles/devil character (Peter Fonda) to restore his father's health.
Unsurprisingly, the deal with the devil doesn't turn out as Blaze intended and our motorcycling hero spends the rest of his young life haunted by the repercussions of the bargain as well as the prospect of the devil coming to collect.
Jump forward however many years to a fully grown Johnny Blaze (Nick Cage). His fame has increased, his stunts are vastly more psychotic (he jumps over a football field loaded with blade-spinning helicopters) and for some reason he drinks martini glasses full of jelly-beans. On top of all this -- and just when Blaze starts to reconnect with his estranged reporter-girlfriend (Eva Mendez) -- the devil comes and tells Blaze to pay up. His method of payment: turning Blaze into a chain-wielding, magic-motorcycle-riding, flaming skeleton to act as his errand boy.
So why does all this suck? It's nothing out of the ordinary -- just good old-fashioned bad writing, directing and acting. Ghost Rider is almost pure cam.
The Romance is sappy, the over-the-top bad guys are one-dimensional and the hero is little more than a fountain of one-liners and cold stares (even when he doesn't have eyes). The film may contain a Faustian pact, but this is obviously no Goethe or Marlowe. Any emotional complexity offered by the whole selling-your-soul-for-power concept is brushed aside. The film goes out of its way to point out that Blaze was duped because he "was a kid" and that he sold his soul for "the right reasons."
And then there's the acting. Cage does what he always does: He looks depressed and mumbles 90 percent of his lines, but somehow it seems that in this iteration, his heart isn't in the performance. Half the time, Cage is so groggy it's as though he were taking naps between takes. Other times it's as though he's struggling to even remember his lines.
Despite Cage's weak performance, it's still the strongest in the film. Mendez is basically floating cleavage. She's pretty, and that's about it. Fonda gives the devil thing an admirable go, but his character is so uninteresting and predictable that it pretty much doesn't matter what he does. The weakest of them all comes from Wes Bentley. He plays Ghost Rider's main adversary, Dark Heart. Bentley may have the look, but his line delivery comes infinitely closer to whiny teenager than bad-ass demon.
Frankly though, the lines the actors were meant to deliver are all so miserably conceived that it's hard to blame any of them too much for their poor performances. Then again, there's no reason to expect much, or anything at all, from Mark Steven Johnson, the writer of Daredevil and Electra.
Ghost Rider has a few nice effect shots and a few of those so-bad-it's-almost-good-moments. Aside from these, the movie is an absolute dud. The film may have garnered a President's Day box office record with $51 million last weekend, but that doesn't stop it from being a record-setting pile of crap.
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