I honestly don’t even know where to begin. After the brief snippet of footage that was screened at Comic Con 2011, I had a tremendous amount of faith in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. I’m a huge fan of the work that Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor did with the Crank films, and I thought their unorthodox style would benefit the Ghost Rider franchise and result in a sequel that far surpassed its predecessor.
Yeah, not so much. This film is a colossal disaster from start to finish, featuring a script that seems unfinished, characters that are barely established, and one of the absolute worst performances in Nicolas Cage’s career.
After a stylish animation sequence that establishes the character’s origin, we find Johnny Blaze living in the Balkans for reasons that are never quite explained (this will become a recurring theme for nearly every major plot point in the film). An alcoholic priest named Moreau (Idris Elba with an inconsistent French accent) shows up on his doorstep and offers to lift the Ghost Rider curse in exchange for Blaze rescuing a young boy named Danny (Fergus Riordan) from the same demonic entity that purchased Blaze’s soul, an entity that is now called Roarke rather than Mephistopheles and is now played by Ciarán Hinds rather than Peter Fonda.
Blaze jumps on his bike and takes off, showing up just as our incredibly boring and non-threatening bad guy Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth) catches up with Danny and his Gypsy mother (Violante Placido). The Ghost Rider emerges and begins to lay waste to Carrigan’s henchmen, turning them into piles of ash and terrifying the bejesus out of everyone – except Carrigan, who takes him out with a grenade launcher and disappears with the kid.
The rest of the film is essentially one drawn-out chase sequence, punctuated by conveniently placed dialogue scenes where our characters try (and fail) to explain exactly what the hell is going on, amounting to nothing more than speed bumps on the road to Blaze’s next transformation into his flaming skeletal alter-ego. To level the playing field, Roarke grants Carrigan some demonic powers of his own, leaving him with pale skin, a bad hair-metal wig, and the EXACT SAME ABILITIES as the first film’s (far more interesting) villain, resulting in confrontations that feel boring, recycle, and unimaginative… because they are.
Cage’s manic, frenzied portrayal of Blaze feels nothing like the character he created in the first film, resulting in plenty of absurd, laughable moments as he shifts the insanity into overdrive, particularly in an interrogation scene where the Ghost Rider is “scraping at the DOOOOOOOR” and Blaze is trying desperately to hold him back. This performance is certainly the highlight of the film – unfortunately, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
While the new design of the Ghost Rider looks fantastic, featuring a charred skull and a leather jacket that bubbles and melts from the heat, the character feels like something from a cartoon, head cocked quizzically to one side as he contemplates his victims or giggling to himself as he turns a piece of construction equipment into a flaming instrument of death. Oh, and he pisses fire, of course.
I’ll give Neveldine and Taylor all the credit in the world for the adventurous and innovative method of filmmaking they developed on the Crank films, but this style doesn’t work here. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is poorly written, poorly edited, and poorly acted, and accomplishes nothing except to showcase that Neveldine and Taylor obviously have no idea what makes the character work. Make no mistake, this is the Batman and Robin of the Ghost Rider franchise, and everyone involved in this mess should be ashamed of themselves.