Film Review: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

No, you don’t have to read it — but you never know, I might crack a clever joke.

Check behind the cut to see if I do.

I don’t think it will surprise anyone at all to note that the first Ghost Rider film was an absolute mess. A sloppy story with rather atrocious acting from people who really should have known better (I’m looking at you, Wes Bentley — what happened?), Ghost Rider couldn’t have been any less of a Marvel property than if the Ghost Rider was just a dude in a white sheet with two cut out holes for eyes riding a bike. Marvel would later begin Marvel Studios and show basically every other studio how to make a good comic book film, especially with their properties, but whether or not any other studio was listening is of course debatable (see: Punisher: War Zone).

However, five years after the first Ghost Rider was released, the folks at Columbia figured that it was a decent idea to get the gang back together again and give it another shot. The thing is, only Nic Cage came back, as it were. The only other returning character was recast (and given a flimsy explanation as to why), a new “love interest” angle was produced, new writers were brought in (most notably Danny Goyer, who worked on all the Blade films and DC’s Batman franchise), and the guys who made Crank were hired to direct. Everyone basically said the same thing: “We’re just going to go all out crazy and have a skeleton on fire riding a bike at the center of it all.” What could possibly go wrong?

Not to put too blunt a point on it, but pretty much everything. As much as the film could conceivably be seen as a bit of a joke, it’s certainly a joke that goes on for far too long.

Then again — what was honestly to be expected? To reiterate, this is a film written by two guys who worked on FlashForward, directed by the guys that wrote Jonah Hex and made Crank, and it stars a lead actor whom you might remember from such classics as Drive Angry 3D and Bangkok Dangerous, whose most famous line is currently asking someone how a doll got burned. It’s a movie that thinks that making jokes about Jerry Springer being the devil is still culturally relevant, and that its lead character urinating fire (in the trailer assumedly as a throwaway gag) is so funny it should be used twice in the film.  The ratio of moments in the film played for laughs against moments that are so bad they’re funny is pretty staggering in favor of the latter, and even Nic Cage’s new “YouTube hypercut waiting to happen” performance ultimately ends up pretty grating — but again, who didn’t see that coming?

The joke so funny the first time you have to see it again (and again)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is not made by anyone who came to this property with an affinity for the rider, thinking that they would make a loving tribute to what is great about the character. No one on the team figured that the $75 million spent to make the film would immortalize his best qualities on film. No, this is a film made by people who think that a flaming skeleton put together with a cacophony of heavy metal and Zimmer-esque string arrangements is just enough. Throw in a supernatural threat who loves Hostess sweets and a Satanic cult, add Christopher Lambert covered in tattoos and maybe, just maybe, people will be bored enough to see it with nothing else in theaters right now. No one involved in the film is similar to, say, Jason Aaron or Rob Williams; no one sees the potential of the Ghost Rider, nor does it seem like anyone cares. Spirit of Vengeance is something like a supernatural grindhouse film, but without the redeeming qualities or self-awareness most grindhouse films actually possess.

Ultimately there is very little of Ghost Rider in the film, despite his name being plastered everywhere. The scenes which he is in (which, for the record, are certainly more than the film this is a sequel to) are amusing, but he’s often there to either stagger around like a drunk version of Samara or just cackle obnoxiously. This is a film ultimately about Johnny Blaze and his insistence on not being Ghost Rider, to the extent that a plan is devised to remove Ghost Rider from him completely. It’s a riff on a popular superhero trope in which the hero abandons his duties only to come back at the end and save the day anyway (think Spider-Man 2 without the Buddy Holly street scene), except this film doesn’t create an arc for Blaze that makes this emotional journey worth watching. Blaze is simply an angry man with terrible one-liners who has symptoms of a drug addict, but he ultimately learns he likes being a drug addict and somehow finds God in the process. Good on you, Blaze, I guess.

This isn’t to say that a decent film can be made by straying from any theoretical limitations of a property. Look at the Blade films, for example, which is a property that David Goyer worked on himself. No, they aren’t that great either, but each film absolutely owns it’s base essence — Blade goes out, finds vampires and then kills them. Even the various Punisher films, for all their obvious flaws, understand that what people want is to see the Punisher killing people. Folks going to see Ghost Rider want to see a demon on a bike doing the Fast and Furious thing with a couple no-gooders, and not much else is required. You would think that the guys who made Crank, a characterless but still fun action-packed 90-minute tornado, would get the idea of just eschewing the drama and pulling out all the stops, btu somewhere along the line the memo is clearly not delivered.

Really, though, the only actually upsetting part about the film is Idris Elba’s involvement. Elba has proven himself as quite the talented actor in the past, especially with his role as the eponymous character on Luther. As the film’s not-quite-alcoholic French biker/preacher, Elba does his best to make you feel a little bit less bad about paying to see the film, but it’s ultimately for naught. As entertaining as Elba is with his boisterous persona and ability to fire guns while falling to his “death” in the first five minutes of the film (spoiler alert: he’s alright), it doesn’t somehow make the hour that he’s not in the film worth watching. It does, however, prove the theory that people like me will pay to see him an hour and a half just because.

Taking pot shots at the film is rather dull, though. Anyone can go into the film with low expectations and not be blown away by its lack of substance; it’s essentially the equivalent of going to see a romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigel and being mad that by the end of the film she’s managed to once again trick filmmakers and moviegoers into thinking she is worth watching for more than a nanosecond. A negative review of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is about as surprising as ABC canceling Work It after two episodes, and is the equivalent of kicking a guy when he’s already down. There is no satisfaction in writing any of this, and all of a sudden going to see a Nic Cage film to see what crrraaaazy thing he’s going to do this time is not an acceptable past time but a rather depressing reality.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is simply a second attempt to infuse drama in a world where it isn’t needed while continuing to remind people that Nic Cage’s Oscar win in 1995 maybe went to the wrong person that year. All of the films in Marvel’s Avengers franchise have proven that what you really need is someone — just one person — involved in the film who truly adores the characters and the medium that the characters come from. Without that crucial element or a stroke of pure luck, you get an hour and a half of missed opportunity after missed opportunity, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Of course, the film is good for one thing: if you had somehow forgotten that joke about Twinkies surviving an apocalypse, prepare for a two second gigglesnort.