‘Ghost Rider’

Staring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Wez Bently, Peter Fonda, Sam Elliott Director: Mark Steven JohnsonRating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

After hundreds of trailers and commercials full of beautiful CGI, action-packed fight scenes and needless destruction, I was fired up to see ‘Ghost Rider.’ Unfortunately, all I did was get burned.

Based on the Marvel comic book, the plot focuses around stunt rider Johnny Blaze, who sold his soul to the devil at an early age to save his cancer-ridden father. Years later, after making his name as the world’s best stunt motorcyclist, he is called upon to do the devil’s bidding. He becomes The Ghost Rider, a fiery spirit of cycling vengeance. Blaze is forced to hunt and kill Blackheart, the devil’s son, who is trying to usurp his father’s position. This is all done while fighting his own demons.

The whole issue with this film is that it’s clich on a lot of different levels. The writing is hackneyed, relying on bad jokes or overly ‘superheroed’ one-liners about destroying evil. There’s plenty of destruction, but a lot of it is unneeded and rather unexciting. Parking meters catch on fire and melt, cars flip into store windows, everything explodes over and over, and it’s hard to care. The camera work is either overly intense or boring, especially during the riding and fight scenes, and it makes the shots look comic.

Then, of course, there’s the acting. Nicholas Cage, with a horrible southern accent not heard since ‘Con Air,’ is awful when trying to do anything that requires a personality. He is confused and transforms almost every mood into it. Compassionate, pensive, depressed, intrigued, irate, melancholy – it’s all very confusing to Nic Cage. The only other emotion he knows is excitement, and it’s easy to tell when Cage is feeling this. His eyes go wide, he throws his hands up, screams and sometimes dances. It’s absolutely awful when Cage morphs to the rider and the CGI skeleton head displays more feeling than he does.

The supporting cast isn’t anything better. Eva Mendes (‘Hitch’), or going by audience attention and screen focus, Mendes’ chest, is flat and boring, not a good thing for a love interest. Wez Bently (‘American Beauty’) looks dark and awesome as the devil’s son, until he opens his mouth and becomes as overly exaggerated as the rest of the movie. The real disappointment lies with veteran actors Peter Fonda (‘Easy Rider’) and Sam Elliot (‘The Hulk’), who were surpassingly uninteresting as the devil and the secret graveyard keeper, respectively.

The film is very pretty at times, but it uses CGI to an extent in which all credibility is lost. It’s fantastic when Cage first catches fire and turns into the rider, but becomes old news by the sixth or seventh time. The CGI fire itself is equally stimulating, but by the end of the movie, when everything is on fire, it just doesn’t matter anymore.

There’s also absolutely no suspense whatsoever; it doesn’t even make an effort. Major villains appear and die almost as quickly. Even the final battle between Blaze and Blackheart is pretty but long and boring, and leaves you feeling, quite fittingly, burnt out. And it’s not just the fact the pace is slow, it’s also incredibly self-referential, making it drag that much more. Johnson has no problem using flashbacks, even within the first 10 minutes, just to make sure no one is confused. But it’s not nearly intricate enough to lose anyone. Watching the movie is painful the first time, much less doing it again.

While viewing this film, I couldn’t help but remember good advice from long ago: ‘If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.’

Lesson learned.

Published on February 17, 2007 at 12:00 pm