Someone needs to stop Mark Steven Johnson from making any more movies. Seriously, Ghost Rider is not the worst Marvel adaptation but it's certainly not the shining star. For some reason, Johnson couldn't decide whether he wanted to make a slick...
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Someone needs to stop Mark Steven Johnson from making any more movies. Seriously, Ghost Rider is not the worst Marvel adaptation but it's certainly not the shining star. For some reason, Johnson couldn't decide whether he wanted to make a slick horror film, a dark comedy, or a western so he decided to do all three and ended up with Ghost Rider, in all its split personality badness. The story starts out with a young Johnny Blaze in a carnival stunt show with his father. He's got a girlfriend who's moving away and he wants to run away with her. But with his father dying of lung cancer, he can't make the leap. So one night, the devil shows up in the form of a very hammy performance by Peter Fonda and offers to cure Johnny's father's cancer in exchange for his soul. Johnny "agrees" and the next morning, dad's all cured. But in a twist of irony, dad dies later on in a motorcycle stunt gone wrong.

Cut to a few years later, and Johnny's a successful stunt rider who seemingly cheats death with every accident. When the devil's son comes to earth to wreak havoc, Lucifer summons Johnny & turns him into Ghost Rider to stop his son. The movie suffers from a lot of things:

* Nicolas Cage delivers a morose yet over the top performance. It also can't be helped that his hairpiece is quite obviously, a bad hairpiece.
* Eva Mendes CAN'T act.
* The villains are LAME!
* While Ghost Rider has a badass character design- flaming skull riding a flaming bike = cool, his powers kind of suck. Aside from using a chain as a whip, his ultimate power is the penance stare, where he stares into a criminal's eyes and all the pain the criminal has inflicted turns back on himself. Cool in concept, but boring to watch.
* Did I mention that Eva Mendes can't act?

I always found Ghost Rider to be an interesting character. Like I said before, he looks great in this film- but the penance stare just doesn't cut it. It would have looked cooler if he unleashed more hellfire-balls. But better special effects still can't fix a movie with stupid plot and bad acting. I even went into this movie with low expectations so that maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised. Well I wasn't, and that makes me sad.