Film Review: Ghost Rider (2007)

Went to see The Fountain last night too… Slowly catching up on films. Anyroad, here’s my take on Ghost Rider…

Ghost Rider (2007)

A comic book adaptation whose premise lured me into the cinema on my own on a Monday afternoon…

Nicholas Cage is in his element (fire) playing ‘Johnny Blaze” a motorbike stuntman who gets royally ripped off after selling his soul to the devil. Instead of ending up in hell, or whatever (I never got the hang of the Terms and Conditions chapter of the bible in divinity classes), he ends up turning into the devil’s collector of souls, or the Ghost Rider, a nocturnal fiery skellington on a bike who makes life thoroughly miserable for naughty people.

Eva Mendes is his love interest who is dull throughout despite plunging necklines and necking a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Wes Bently is the devil’s son who, together with some wholly ineffectual and cack-handed fellow demon-goons, is trying to either take over the netherworld or create hell on earth or just gorge on souls. Not wholly clear again which. They’re meant to be evil since they have no problem turning bikers into dust, including, gasp, a lady and some interloper who was ‘just 3 weeks from retirement”. However they have no decent dialogue, don’t kill anywhere near enough people and, most importantly, lack imagination in their modus operandi for dispensing souls. Not worthy adversaries for Johnny B. and I don’t know why the devil couldn’t just get rid of them himself with a plague of boils or whatever…

There’s a strong sense of déja-vu not uncommon with this type of B-movie. The carnie scenes are straight out of DIRE Batman Forever (1995) where Robin gets his pitiful back story. Also, DIRE Little Nicky (2000) has the same Satan’s-offspring-want-to-take-over-the-world nonsense. Any werewolf film you care to mention probably deals better with the subject of nocturnal transmogrification and the consequences on your love life/ work/ friends… Crossroads (1986), about the karate kid duelling with the Devil’s guitarist, Steve Vai covers much of the same ridiculous Catholic ground… So what rescues Ghost Rider from being a directing-by-numbers clichéd bag of arse? Well there’s a few things…

Sam Elliot (the cowboy in The Big Lebowski) seems to take the whole thing in his stride and effortlessly conveys a mythic element to the proceedings. He’s not exactly stretching his acting abilities but gives the film his much-needed seen-it-all, world-weary attitude. The Ghost Rider abides… Nick Cage plays up Johnny’s quirks well and you warm to his special brand of stupid, making you believe that it’s not impossible for your head to periodically turn into a grinning, flaming skull. But it’s the CGI and the sound effects that carry the film. If you go to see this film it’s probably because you want to see an overly anorexic biker dispensing fiery justice and so it’s entirely a good thing that for roughly a third of the film, you’ll be watching just that. The sound effects left me with tinnitus for half an hour after leaving the cinema- it’s like sitting in the central reservation of the M5 motorway for 2 hours with someone lighting a gas boiler next to you- whump!- from time to time. And all in all, it’s a superior summer blockbuster delivered early.

In summary then, though far from intelligent, nowhere near dark enough, and clichéd to the point of plagiaristic it’s a big, brash, loud and eminently watchable piece of theatre.