Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

By Bob Garver

I got some com­plaints a few weeks ago over my review of “Under­world: Awak­en­ing.” The film was the fourth in a fran­chise, and I men­tioned that I hadn’t seen the pre­vi­ous three. I then pro­ceeded to trash the film, and it remains my fron­trun­ner for Worst of the Year. A few “Under­world” fans con­tacted me to say that I wasn’t giv­ing the film a chance, that I was join­ing the series in progress with­out the proper prepa­ra­tion. They had a point, maybe famil­iar­ity with the fran­chise would have led to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the most recent install­ment. I vowed to do bet­ter next time.

“Next time” was this past week­end with the release of “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.” Once again, I was about to go see a sequel with­out being acquainted with the orig­i­nal. So I did some scram­bling and watched the 2007 pre­de­ces­sor on Thurs­day before catch­ing the new release on Fri­day. What I accom­plished was wast­ing a per­fectly good Thurs­day night in addi­tion to Friday.

In the films, Nicholas Cage plays motor­cy­cle stunt­man Johnny Blaze. The Devil has endowed him with super­pow­ers, includ­ing the abil­ity to light things on fire, suck out souls, and do really dan­ger­ous things with motor­cy­cles. When he’s using his pow­ers, Johnny’s head morphs into a flam­ing skull. Both films are sur­pris­ingly dull despite these awe­some elements.

The only good the first film did for me was explain how Johnny got the pow­ers of the Rider from the Devil. He traded his soul for his father’s life, which the Devil took any­way on a tech­ni­cal­ity. The Devil then had the right to use Johnny as his ser­vant, task­ing him with col­lect­ing evil souls. Johnny has since bro­ken free of the devil’s con­trol, and is now try­ing to stop him at all costs.

The plot for the sequel involves the Devil (now played by Cia­ran Hinds instead of Peter Fonda from the orig­i­nal) try­ing to take over the body of his son (Fer­gus Rear­don), a boy of about ten who isn’t ready to do evil. Johnny ini­tially tries to res­cue the boy for self­ish pur­poses, but takes a shine to him and then does so for the right rea­sons. He is aided by Moreau (Idris Elba), a drunken monk more inter­est­ing and wor­thy of his own movie than Johnny.

The spe­cial effects are a lit­tle bet­ter this time around. There’s a decent sequence where Johnny’s face tries to morph into the flam­ing skull, but keeps get­ting only about halfway there. Aside from that, I don’t have too many com­pli­ments. Cage’s hammy per­for­mance is still a dis­trac­tion and the story moves along at a snail’s pace. One spe­cific prob­lem I had was that I could never tell if Johnny was doing his soul-sucking schtick or not. Come to think of it, I don’t remem­ber him actu­ally doing it once in the entire movie.

The close prox­im­ity with which I saw the two films affords me the oppor­tu­nity to eval­u­ate “Ghost Rider” as a fran­chise. Sim­ply put, it doesn’t deserve to be one. At least not with Nicholas Cage and the sloppy action sequences. There’s prob­a­bly a good movie to have with the char­ac­ter, but we haven’t got­ten it after two tries. At least you can have some fun going to the the­ater for “Spirit of Vengeance,” but to watch the orig­i­nal “Ghost Rider” at home is to waste your valu­able time alone.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and vio­lence, some dis­turb­ing images, and lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 95 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Feb 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.