The first Ghost Rider movie, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, is a contender for worst comic book movie ever, which pretty much puts it in line to be a contender for worst movie ever. When that massive turd hit theaters it didn’t seem very likely to anybody that a sequel would ever be made. But, you know, that’s the magic of opening weekends and overseas grosses. Pull in enough that first weekend, before people know what they’re dealing with, and pull in enough overseas, where big, broad stupidity seems to be the thing that best crosses language barriers, and even the crappiest of movies can be viewed as a success. So here we have Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel brought to us by Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Now that the Ghost Rider character is in different creative hands, how does it fare? Not well. This fetid sequel is nearly as bad as the original, but seeing as it is a bit more self-aware about its badness, not quite as laughably so; which pretty much ruins the whole point of going to see a Nic Cage movie.
That’s the second thing you need to know about this sequel. One might think that if you were going to take a second crack at Ghost Rider you would want to distance yourself as much from that abysmal first film as possible; start things completely over, put together a completely new cast... but here he is, Nic Cage, once again playing Johnny Blaze. This time he’s wrapped up in a plot that involves the Devil who turned him into a demon (Ciarán Hinds) hunting down a woman (Violante Placido) and her child (Fergus Riordan), because the kid is his spawn, and the fresh, young body he plans on transferring his consciousness into. Along for some of the ride as well is Moreau (Idris Elba), some sort of leather jacketed, French monk who’s presence in the story seemed completely unnecessary (though I can’t complain because, hey, Idris Elba), and a secondary bad guy who is hired to track down the boy and his mother, and who later gets turned into a demon named Ray (Johnny Whitworth).
I smooshed all of the actors’ names and the brief plot synopsis into that one paragraph because this is the last I will mention any of them. Who the characters are or how the actors fared in their roles isn’t worth discussing. This movie is so bad that they never became a consideration. Instead, I’ll just be going down a check list and talking about how stupid everything is. First off, the script is terrible. If you want to give any action movie an immediate kiss of death, making the story heavily feature a kid is a pretty sure way to do it, and, sure enough, the kid here is terrible and the fact that everything centers on him ruins any chance that this movie will be any fun at all. Note to all future filmmakers: leave little kids out of your action movie. It never works!
This script is so haphazard that you can’t even begin to analyze how effectively it tells its story, because it has a hard enough time even making sense from scene to scene. Once the kid is kidnapped Cage and the mom interrogate a goon to find out where he’s being held. Upon receiving said information Cage instantly jumps on his motorcycle, which is a sort of magical, demon motorcycle that goes about a million miles an hour, flies across the country in a screaming trail of fire, gets to the bad guy’s hideout and finds that... the mother is already there? Then there’s another scene, where the devil is turning our dying secondary villain into a demon in the middle of a murder scene. There are officials there attending to the scene, and then this guy casually walks up to one of the (still dying!) bodies, starts fiddling with it, turns it into a demon, then they both casually walk away, while none of the EMTs on the scene say or do anything about it, or even really notice that it’s happening. I don’t want to go off on a rant about how little anything in this movie makes sense, because its not worth it. Just know that this is a film that you can’t think about the particulars of for even a second while you’re watching it.
One thing I will mention is how vague and inconsistent this film is about Ghost Rider and his powers. In the first film, they made a point to mention that Cage can’t feel the effects of what happens to the Rider, and then they have a later scene where he’s feeling some effects from being shot that blatantly contradicted the statement. I thought that was about the dumbest thing I’d ever seen in a movie, and such stupidity continues here. First off, the extent of his powers and what he is capable of is never explored or explained, so the action scenes that he partakes in have no tension whatsoever. As far as we’re concerned this is an unstoppable, all powerful entity who can do whatever he wants; so putting him in tense, dangerous situations is near impossible. Secondly, they continue to be completely inconsistent about what can and can’t hurt him. At one point he gets shot a few times and wakes up in a hospital bed extremely beat up and covered in scars. At other points he’s literally taking shots from rocket launchers and he still keeps coming, seemingly none the worse for wear. Every basic lesson of how to make an action scenario compelling or purposeful is completely ignored in this rock stupid movie, so everything you watch comes off as boring and groan inducing.
The stupidity extends to the film’s dramatic moments as well. Over the course of the movie Cage’s character spends about ten minutes with the mother and the son, and has about one conversation with them a piece; but for some reason we’re asked to believe that they’ve bonded together like some sort of family unit. Cage has literally just met these people and he’s always touching them and gazing at them with affection. It’s totally creepy. Then there’s a big finale where the kid is in a sort of trance and the devil is trying to transfer his brain into his body. Cage tries to talk him into fighting the process by basically saying, “Remember that thing we talked about the one time we talked?! You can’t turn evil because of how deeply our shared words touched you!” It’s ridiculous. If there wasn’t time to grow relationships between these three characters because there was too much dumb action stuff you wanted to get to, that’s fine, just make a dumb action movie with no character elements. But don’t spend five minutes faking it so you can pretend like your awful story has some sort of dramatic climax where the characters reach catharsis.
The script isn’t the only thing here worth complaining about either. Top to bottom, everything is horrible. The music is so generic and cloying that its cues actually telegraph what’s going to happen in scenes before anything occurs. The effect is that you feel like a blind person being led through the film by hand. And, as irritating as this sounds, perhaps it was necessary, because the camera work here is so bad that there are quite a few moments where you wouldn’t know what was going on otherwise. I mean—for real—this is some of the worst camera work of all time. I’m not going to harp on it, because it’s something that everyone probably expects going into a Neveldine and Taylor movie, but there it is. The camera is constantly moving, the shots are all pushed in too close, and generally you can’t follow what’s going on at all whenever things get actiony. At the worst point the Rider hops on a big crane-type machine that turns flaming and demonic to take out all of the bad guys and the visual storytelling of the film basically degenerates into looking like Transformers on fire. It felt like the directors were just mocking me. Transformers was hard enough to watch not on fire, what are you trying to prove?
There are a couple scenes here and there where the mess of failed sequential storytelling pauses to show off a stylized visual flourish or two, scenes where the Rider is depicted with a sort of pop-art aesthetic, and these brief moments made it look like the directors were at least trying to do something interesting with the material; but they were too brief to matter. They come off as complete afterthoughts rather than evidence that craftsmanship was a goal that anybody set when approaching this project. Instead of thinking about any of the visual choices that Neveldine and Taylor made, you spend a lot more time thinking about things like, ”What the hell was with that one scene that was still in English but randomly subtitled?”
We need to talk about Nic Cage. Once Cage’s name gets attached to a movie it stops getting looked at as a normal movie and starts getting viewed as a “Nic Cage movie,” so we should address how Spirit of Vengeance works on that level. These days you know that a movie with Nic Cage is going to be horrifically bad, but there’s always the train wreck factor of wondering how insane he can get that makes the experience of sitting through them worthwhile anyway. The one good decision that the creators of this one made was the choice to have Cage constantly fighting the influence of the Rider throughout the whole movie. It gave him plenty of opportunity to grunt, yell, and make funny faces; and generally he’s completely Cageing out every second that he’s on screen. And, as an added bonus, this time the Rider clearly has Cage mannerisms as well. In the first film the demon came off as a stiff, generic CG creation, but here they had Cage doing the performing even when he’s on fire. So the weird, jerky, robo-bird body language never stops. Like I said in the opening though, the first Ghost Rider seemed to be a little less self-aware of what a bad movie it was, so this one ends up being a little less fun to mock. But it still has enough of that how-stupid-is-he-gonna-get factor going for it that concerned onlookers documenting Cage’s descent into madness should find plenty of material to chew on.
