Another Marvel comic hero has been brought back to life – or death in this case – on celluloid.
Usually when studios don’t have press screenings, or have them the night before the film is released, nine times out of 10 that movie will be a stinker. Unfortunately, this is one of those nine.
Ghostrider has been around since the early ’70s, a skeleton action hero clad in black leather whose head is consumed in fire. His alter ego is a motorcycle Evel Knievel-type named Johnny Blaze. Nicolas Cage dons the mantle of Blaze, a bounty hunter for Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda) with a hellfire cycle.
Most of the blame for this rather soulless film – pun intended – can fall on the shoulders of director/writer Mark Steven Johnson (“Daredevil” and “Elektra”), who is no newcomer to bad superhero movies.
Apart from a basically plotless script, he makes Johnny Blaze a complete wuss. To warm up for huge and dangerous tricks, Johnny listens to – get this – The Carpenters and “drinks” jelly beans from a martini glass.
It’s a shame, because this film could have been really badass.
The brief back-story is that the young Blaze sells his soul to Mephistopheles to save his father, Barton Blaze, from terminal cancer. Johnny is tricked and his father, also a motorcycle stunt man, dies the next day in an accident during one of his tricks.
The devil keeps his bargain, in a sense, but Johnny is furious about his father’s death. Mephistopheles warns Johnny that he will call on him someday to keep his end of the bargain.
Fast forward to present-day Johnny. For some reason, this guy is absurdly famous for making insanely long jumps with his motorcycle.
Considering he usually crashes at the end and somehow survives, one might think, “Does he have an angel on his shoulder?” No, no, no my friends, he has a devil waiting to collect on his end of the bargain. It’s just a matter of plot timing.
Mephistopheles finally reappears in Johnny’s life when his demonic son Blackheart (Wes Bently “American Beauty”) tries to edge his old devil of a father out of the picture. Johnny is then forced to become the Ghostrider and stop Blackheart from obtaining a scroll of a thousand evil souls.
At one of his shows, Johnny runs into his love interest from when he was a young carnie. Roxanne, played by the lovely but annoying Eva Mendez (“Hitch” and “Stuck on You”) plays his former belle who is now a local television reporter.
There’s a need for a pretty face in movies to balance out the action with some romance, but Mendez can’t come to the aid of an already sinking ship.
In fact, it felt as if she were jumping up and down trying to sink the ship faster.
Cage was a decent choice to play Blaze, but his tongue-in-cheek humor comes out once again and helps turn something that could have been cool into a joke of a video game.
Yes, it’s impressive when Ghostrider transforms and does his Penance Stare, a gaze that makes its subjects feel the pain of all their victims, to evildoers. But the fights with the bad guys have no depth to them. He mostly rides around on the bike, grabs the bad guy and stares at him.
Save your soul and your money. If you really want to see a guy on fire, use that 10 bucks to go buy an action figure and set him ablaze.
It will be way more fun and entertaining.
