![]() ![]() It's a complete mess.įor acting to be this bad in movie not directed by Michael Bay or George Lucas, it has to be intentional. As a result, it's impossible to enjoy on any level. ![]() The chief problem with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is that it never embraces its utter awfulness. Neveldine & Taylor should have used Drive Angry as a template - it recognized what it was and never tried to be anything more. Roarke (Ciaran Hinds, who never once utters the line "Welcome to Fantasy Island") and his henchman, Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth).įor some reason, Cage seems trapped in movies about demons and devils: the first Ghost Rider, Season of the Witch, Drive Angry, and now this one. ![]() As payment for this, Johnny has to escort sulky pre-teen Danny (Fergus Riordan) and his hot mother, Nadya (Violante Placido), to a monastery while being pursued by Satan a.k.a. Enter Moreau (Idris Elba), who claims to belong to a sect of ascetic monks who can rid him of the Rider. The starting point is that Johnny Blaze (Cage), hiding out in Eastern Europe where it's cheaper to film, desperately wants to be rid of the curse that changes him into Ghost Rider. I suppose when you start with the premise that the lead character has a righteous demon trapped inside that causes him to burst into flame at inopportune moments, anything goes. I don't know whether a lot of material was removed from the final cut or whether it never made sense from the beginning. It can be a little difficult to decipher the plot because the screenplay reads like a comic book with a bunch of pages ripped out. People talk and talk and talk like they're stuck in a parody of a Dan Brown novel, and they simply won't shut up. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is essentially a mixture of nonsensical story elements, bad special effects, and endless exposition. The over-the-top outlandishness can't disguise that the whole 95 minutes represent one big snooze-fest. In the case of Ghost Rider: Sprit of Vengeance, Neveldine & Taylor turn the "campiness" dial to 11 with as much limburger as they can gather, but they forget a key element - the "action/adventure" one. Some of the most entertaining action/adventure movies layer it on like a pizza. Columbia Pictures showed admirable restraint in not selling Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance as being "from the writer of The Dark Knight," although that would have been technically accurate.Ī certain amount of cheese is acceptable, even desirable, in a movie such as this. Goyer, who at some point probably tried desperately to get his name removed). Gimple & Seth Hoffman) and one of the men behind Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (David S. The new directors, Neveldine & Taylor, are the Crank guys and the screenplay is credited to two TV writers (Scott M. Admittedly, pretty much everyone else, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, has been jettisoned, leaving minimal traces of the first Ghost Rider. In some circles, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has been referred to as more of a "reboot" than a "sequel," although I'm not aware of any reboots that have featured the same actor in the lead role. Also, I know Nic Cage is in financial distress and has to film pretty much every screenplay with which he is presented, but doesn't the law of averages demand that somewhere along the way, if only by accident, he would stumble upon a good movie? By making this film, they are reminding us what a bad comic book movie is really like, thereby elevating the relative quality of their recent stretch of mediocre efforts and lowering the bar for Marvel's big summer twosome: The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man. A single viewing makes it obvious why Marvel Enterprises would move forward with the sequel to a feature whose box office performance was underwhelming. A few random thoughts about Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. ![]()
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