Ghost Rider (2007)

By Ephraim Belnap

Directed by: Mark Steven Johnson

Starring: Nicolas Cage as the title role, Eva Mendes, Sam Elliot

Just a frikkin' mess, man. I mostly watched this 'cause we wanted to do a Nicolas Cage night. This movie is a freakin' masterpiece of mid-2000's emo punk film production dysfunction. With the 2005 Constantine and 2004's Hellboy, you can form an unofficial trilogy of the same. Although Hellboy is an order of magnitude better than those other two. 

Comic book Ghost Rider is the story of a cocky, handsome young stunt biker who sells his soul to the devil to save the life of a loved one. From then on, he's cursed to become a Satanic biker at night pushed to punish the souls of the wicked. He's got chains, fire, a stare that burns you up with your sins, super-strength, and an awesome bike. Young, virile, extreme, combative, terrifying. 

The film version is a 43-year old Nicolas Cage (who unfortunately looks it) with a pronounced Southern accent spending twenty minutes total as the skullfaced wonder and the rest of the time as the protagonist of a most poorly scripted romantic comedy. 

The scripting is just terrible. It's like all the worst parts of the Raimi Spider-Man films. The casting is bad; Nicolas Cage was too old for the character and might have been too old in his thirties. The aesthetic is just cringy; gothic and dark without understanding the emotional core of that look. And the plot is just awful; Johnny Blaze is a pawn in a game between super-devils but doesn't understand anything, so it's just him reacting to weirdos until he limps his way to a finale.

The film's almost inexplicable choice to infuse a Western into this story (probably an attempt to "mainstreamify" the stories for a general audience) just ends up making it feel confused. The appeal of the occult-lite, spikes-and-skulls, deal-with-the-devil genre isn't in the building of a community, which is what a Western is always about. The appeal is in the pull between dark and light. The protagonist is always touched by evil, usually the devil, but they're still always trying to do good. Can they escape that touch definitively? Watch to find out! That's not what Ghost Rider is at all, and that's why it's bad.

Johnny Blaze in the comics is someone who 

struggles with his personhood; not a hard-talking gunslinger

It's just a frikkin' mess. Incoherent, badly paced, with the wrong choices for everything; an example of a company making a film more than an artist and failing as a result. But it does provide some prime Nicolas Cage faces, so there's that.