Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Review

If the first Ghost Rider was any indication that there shouldn’t be anymore Ghost Rider movies, then this sequel confirms that no one can do a proper Ghost Rider movie and the evils of Hollywood should just leave it alone instead of subjecting the movie going public to more of these films. If the guys that made probably one of the best modern exploitative films can’t do a proper adaptation of the comic book character, then no one can. It’s no surprise that veering off into the direction of just plain, silly fun would be the only solution that Hollywood could think of, yet even then; they can’t manage to make a “good” or even “fun” film. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is like a car that just needs to be recalled so it can be perfect yet, the people in charge of fixing it just manage to make it worse, and “we” the audience are forced to take the chance to drive it and see the outcome for ourselves.

       Ghost Rider almost feels like a new film rather than a sequel as it doesn’t mention anything that happened in the previous film, as if the producers are trying to make the audience forget that film (don’t worry, at least we can now see their new disaster and forget that old one) however, they do establish that Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) has been cursed with the powers of the rider as he accidentally made a deal with the devil and now is a cursed monster forced to control his rider powers before they get the best of him. Now the only thing resembling a plot seems to be how a secret church asks for the help of Johnny to rescue a boy who the devil needs to transfer himself in. That’s about all I could understand as this whole movie is riddled with exposition and monotonous dialogue that makes me wonder if the actors know what they’re actually saying. All we know is bad guys want something and the good guys try and stop them, that’s it.

        Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are the guys responsible for the direction of this film, now before blaming the directors for this mess; I don’t believe this is entirely their fault. In fact, for what they try to do sometimes worked as they are known for their frenetic crazy, out-of-the-world camera techniques as they can literally make you feel your in the action, however, those techniques do barley anything to sustain an audience for two hours. Most of the problems are with the script and once seeing the film, all you can think of is, “who wrote this mess?” And it’s that reason is why the film suffers and collapse on itself. This film is riddled with exposition after exposition only to have a short break for mild, mundane and dull action. Yes, even the action can’t be entertaining. The action feels like it’s been regurgitated from better action films, even the sound is horribly designed. There are moments here where it’s trying to be a “loud and rumpus” action flick, yet the sound is done so badly that you just feel bored for something to impress you.

Nicolas Cage seemed like the only bright spot to this as he pulls off yet another wacky, crazy, drug-infused performance that had potential to be even amazing for Cage’s standards, yet, he downplays the crazy aspects and only shows little bits of it and it makes you wonder if he just pretends to be laughably bad n projects in which he thinks are good and just plain bad in projects he just doesn’t care for. This could have topped Wicker Man Nicolas Cage yet; it barely comes the level of Drive Angry Nicolas Cage. The rest of the cast is just plain bad and hard to watch as they have to spout the terrible dialogue written for them.

There honestly was some hope for this film as it had the talent to be great, yet, with the confines of Hollywood creating terrible script after terrible script, it falls into a limbo of other forgotten projects that have succumbed to the money-hungry studio executives that try and dupe the movie going public into what seems like cheap, fun, guilty trash, but just lives up to the name of just being “plain, simple and unapologetic trash.”

D- by Amritpal Rai