Spiderman, Hulk, The Fantastic Four, X-Men, etc are all quite high profile Marvel comic book heroes that most people have heard of even if they don’t read many comics. Ghost Rider is a rather more obscure one, on the grounds that he was never really all that hoot even in the comics. Making a film of his adventures at all smacks of a certain degree of barrel scraping. All that can be said of the film is that it isn’t as bad as I expected it to turn out, but that does not make it good.
Nicholas Cage is playing Johnny Blaze a Carpenters music fan and a motorcycle daredevil in the Evil Kneival league. His dad is dying of cancer. Blaze naively sells his soul to Satan (Peter Fonda, the film’s only really inspired casting) to save his dad, and gets told that one day he must do Satan a favour. Satan then kills Blaze Senior anyway in an accident unrelated to his cancer. Blaze Junior is angry – he is also strangely indestructible, as he learns when he survives life-threatening accidents in his stunt work. Thais make him take more and more risks, though the stunts are obviously faked.
Suddenly, the Devil makes his call. Johnny becomes the Ghost rider, a burning skeleton on a blazing sixties chopper bike like those seen in Easy Rider (but not on fire then), and his job is to round up any demons and dammed souls who escaped from Hell and send them back. That is then pretty much the gist of the film. Ghost Rider, replacing the actor with pure CGI, occasionally takes out muggers and other evildoers along the way – his gaze fills them with Hellish guilt for their crimes.
The biggest problem with Ghost Rider is that he is ridiculously easy to track. His blazing bike sets fire to everything he passes and melts tarmac for miles. He is the most highly visible of all secret superheroes. There is none of the discreet roof crawling we get from Batman after dark here. Ghost Rider ends up taking on the entire LAPD and a SWAT team. His human girlfriend also seems to have no concern about kissing a man who is so obviously demonic too.
There is a pointless sub-plot about the sage advice Ghost rider gets from a previous ghost rider, a cowboy of the old west, who is now a graveyard care-taker. He briefly rides with ghost-rider on a fiery horse, as the inevitable song Ghost Riders In The Sky is played. We then never see the Gravedigger again. He makes no appearance in the final duel Ghost Rider has with the main villains, who in this film, prove to be instantly forgettable.
Arthur Chappell
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