Ghost Rider

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Summary:
 Johnny Blaze makes a deal with Mephistopheles to save his father's life. Of course the mean old devil shortchanges him, puts on a curse as well as gets to keep Johnny's soul - and I'm not talking about The James Brown kinda soul, either! Several years later, the evil bastard comes to collect his debt, making Blaze turn into a flaming skullheaded skeleton man at night, collecting souls that are to be sent straight to Hell.
In this first theatrical outing, Ghost Rider must confront Blackheart, a nitrous oxide addicted (since he's always tittering) vampirish Emo goth-rocker that never sings, who happens to be the son of the Devil (no WONDER he doesn't wanna go near his own son!). He plans to create Hell on Earth by collecting 1000 evil souls.

Review:
  My biggest prayer, and my only desire for this movie was that it would be better than that painfully bad POS dungheap that is Daredevil. And it was! Ghost Rider was a steaming pile of shit, but not quite a dungheap!! Amazing!

Ghost Rider spent a couple of years in development hell for an uncountable number of reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason was that studio execs prayed that the world wouldn't have to see this movie. It was refused pre-screening for critics to save from bad word of mouth before release, but that didn't stop America from flocking to the theaters to check it out anyways. It's a testament to the slew of bad movies that have been released this year, as well as proof that there must have been a deal with the Devil to make this a success.
There's no way of pinpointing particular moments that makes this movie bad. Every single scene was mishandled and badly executed. It was so bad that I felt as if my brain was injected with novocaine, numbly sitting through the movie with a dumb sense of disjointed ambivalence. I wanted to laugh at the screen, while also get teary-eyed at how much better this could have been. Scene one looked pretty, in a cartoony LXG kind of way. Sure, the production value is passable, but painfully generic. There's no FLAIR to the pretty colors and shoddy CGI. Ghost Rider himself looked alright, but he never ever looked like anything more than an animated slice of unreality, and none of the effects really fit into a real world setting. Colorful and neat-looking yes, but the geometry of everything done in CGI made it look unreal, mixed with the oversaturated colors of the flames and heavy use of blue... never ever looked real. Just pretty.
Nic Cage did provide me with some good laughs, especially his outrageous overacting upon the first transformation to the Ghost Rider. AWESOME! Eva Mendes' introductory scene was so badly acted that I would swear she was given oversized cue cards just offscreen with blotchy water-smeared text, making it extremely difficult for her to read after she had 8 shots of Patron ten minutes before Johnson yelled "and.... ACTION"! She was adorable in Hitch. She really can act, but in Ghost Rider, it wasn't acting more than mugging for the camera and giving off the impression that she was high on something while filming. She's just kinda "out there", and not really "with it".
Then there's Wes Bentley, who is known best for his totally Emo performance in American Beauty (what a tool that dude was!), this time as the bad guy that sucks people cold to death (I don't know how else to explain it), but not without killing them with his endless one-liners that are like a wooden stake through the heart. I can't blame Bentley for his performance, since it's all in the bad writing, and Johnson managing to make EVERYONE in this movie perform like a seventh grade overacting drama troupe performing Shakespeare for the first time. He titters and cackles every chance he gets, because isn't that what evil bad guys are SUPPOSED to do?

There are three villains that are literally thrown into the story, who I guess are supposed to help Blackheart find something or SOMETHING - I don't know, I wasn't paying attention when he said their names and mentioned for two seconds during their intro what they were supposed to be doing in this movie. They are composed of a few of earth's elements, it seems. One is water element, another is dirt element, and the third is wind/air... or something like that. What I find most spectacular is that they are the wimpiest and most unimportant bad guys I've ever seen in any movie EVER. Each of them get to get one hit on Ghost Rider, and then good ol' GR creates a lame video-game styled one-button move that kills them within one minute of the battle starting - but not before they get to hiss at him and run away from an arm's length of GR and look intimidating! If you didn't have these guys in the movie at all, there would have been 7 minutes taken out of the movie, AND you wouldn't get to have that highlighted question mark lingering in your head about the pussifications of these guys' lack of importance and the simplicity of their demise.
Upon the conclusion of Ghost Rider, the very last scene was the biggest mystery of all. I don't want to spoil the movie - even though it's already been spoiled by the dung-laced hands of the writers and director - but it has to do with the way Johnny Blaze keeps his curse, and by how he gets away with so many GOOD things that once seemed like sacrifices, and the mystery of Mephistopheles' accepting his circumstance. He's a fucking DEMON, yo! Start some shit up, and NOW, punkass! But no, instead we get... the ending of the movie. All the way to the last frame, I couldn't help but shake my head and continue to feel that numbness in my brain. Not even the thumping of my heartbeat could be felt in my dumbed down head while watching Ghost Rider. It was too busy being filled with wonder at how so much can go wrong in one movie.

In conclusion, Ghost Rider is about as bad as I expected it to be. Somehow, I sat through it without a blood pressure raising level of animosity. I couldn't help but think the whole time how it was still better than Daredevil. I feel Daredevil is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and so Ghost Rider had a lot to sink down to in order to "top" that one. Yes, this is a bad movie. It's almost funny, but the threatening feather of tickling laughter didn't quite reach my funny bone, so instead the only bone I got from this flick was Mendes' heavenly rack and Ghost Rider's flaming skull.

GRADE: D-

Reviewed: 3/14/07