Introduction
There are some movies that revel in their awfulness with such joy that the result is great. Then there are other movies that go even further into the "terrible" sea that they are complete garbage, causing near blindness. "Ghost Rider" is the Chris Columbus of these movies.
"See our trench coats? Don't they just scream 'evil!'?"
Since I'm both a comic book reader and a movie fan, I really pull for comic book movies. I think the trailers almost always look good, and I want the movies to not only be good, but to do well so that more comics will make their way into the movie pipeline. There are hundreds of excellent stories buried throughout comic history waiting to be brought to life, and yet Hollywood continues to refuse to use them. It is with some disappointment that I announce that "Ghost Rider" is an absolute atrocity; a crime against both comics and film. This movie is so offensive that all prints of it should be nailed up in a box and put in that storage room at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" preventing its filth from infecting people and plant life nearby. I'm not a Ghost Rider purist, and I haven't been reading the comics since they debuted. I have read some of them, and I don't remember feeling compelled to burn them and myself afterwards. Because of this, I feel that "Ghost Rider" is not a fair adaptation of the Ghost Rider comic character. Sure, he looks like Ghost Rider, and the character effects are impressive (the one good thing that prevents my conscious mind from creating a new personality to deal with this trauma), but this was not the Ghost Rider movie I wanted to see.
Seconds into the movie, I was already disappointed. Will someone please figure out a way to open a superhero movie without a voiceover? You Hollywood writers are supposed to be mildly creative; can you spend an extra 15 minutes on a different way to begin one of these things? Speaking of the writing, I think Mark Steven Johnson (credited with screenplay and screen story as well as directing) just took the script for "Spawn" and did a find/replace. Beat-for-beat, the stories are almost identical. I guess this kind of formulaic writing has proven popular, though. People do watch a lot of "C.S.I." The problem I had with the script was that the dialogue in every scene is so cliché. Every line is the most obvious thing the character could say next, and there is absolutely zero subtext. It's like Johnson was playing Family Feud with the dialogue and only using the number one answers. The fact that several puns found their way into the script makes me hope that perhaps some of the awfulness was a result of studio pressure. I will offer this, though: if you show a kid riding a motorcycle, zoom into his eyes, cross-fade to Nic Cage's eyes, then zoom out, I'm going to understand that they are same person. They don't have to share the exact same haircut. No one keeps the same haircut for their entire life.
When "Ghost Rider" is at its absolute worst is when the villains are on-screen. Not only do both Ghost Rider and Johnny Blaze incessantly point at them and say, "You," like Elvis after a stroke, but the actors in these roles are just terrible. This has to be the all-time lamest portrayal of the Devil in any medium. I think George Burns from "Oh, God! You Devil" is more menacing. Peter Fonda is a fine actor, but he's not going to pull off Mephistopheles. I realize Mephistopheles' comic appearance is somewhat hardcore, but when the main character of your movie is a burning skeleton, I think you can get a little closer than an old man in a black trench coat and still preserve your suspension of disbelief. The same goes for Blackheart. Whoever cast Wes Bentley in this must have been wearing a Trainee badge. The last time I saw Wes Bentley he was crying over a plastic bag. You can't now have him looking exactly the same as his sensitive crybaby character from "American Beauty", dress him in a Goth Euro-trash vampire costume, call him Blackheart, and expect me to take him seriously. The other three villains are such non-characters they wouldn't even count as mini-bosses in a videogame. These villains are "Elektra" caliber.
I have to admit that the actual Ghost Rider effects are very well done, and there are some iconic shots where I glimpsed something approaching the movie I wanted. However, there is way too much unforgivable garbage to get past. For instance (just off the top of my head) why is the water villain all surprised when Johnny Blaze turns into Ghost Rider during their fight in the third act? He's already been to two fights with this guy, but somehow he's completely taken aback when Blaze bursts into flames just because they are under water. Why can Sam Elliott only turn into the Ghost Rider one more time, and why does he just ride down the road and not actually go to the fight? By far the most important unanswered question is why, in the name of all that is Holy, is Eva Mendes' character carrying around a full-size magic eight ball in her purse? Who does that? I thought "Ghost Rider" was turning into "The Naked Gun" at that point, and I fully expected Leslie Nielsen to defeat Blackheart with a wiffle ball to the groin. I refuse to believe that this is what Hollywood thinks we want for our comic book heroes. If this is the best they can do, they should just leave these characters on the page. It won't take many more of these before I set my own head on fire.
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