Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance [2012]
Yeah, no wonder the rights to the character reverted to Marvel.
The second movie for the most badass of Marvel superheroes, Ghost Rider, came out around 5 years after the first... and it feels like one of the Transformers sequels, really. Most of the Transformers sequels have great action scenes, high production values, but are bogged down by an inane plot that makes very little sense and sub-par human actor performances.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance suffers from basically the same problems. The slight retooling to Ghost Rider's appearance compared to the 2007 movie is definitely neat. I'm not the biggest fan of the Rider ditching his 'nice jacket', and his new jacket and bike look like they're half melted... but I'm definitely a huge fun of his flame-bleached black skull, as well as his inhuman jerking and moving around -- most unsettlingly seen when the Ghost Rider first appears in this movie to murder a bunch of random mooks. The visuals in this movie is amazingly done, and while the previous movie relied on having Ghost Rider appear exclusively at night to highlight the amazingness of his flaming skull, the final action scene is a road chase that takes place in the day, which is pretty damn awesome to watch.
Plus, one of the middle scenes in the movie is Ghost Rider riding a big-ass mining machine, empowering it with the flames of hell and using it to murder everyone while Ghost Rider just cackles on the control station. The Ghost Rider in this movie is just straight-up positively inhuman when he's not being an action hero, and one of his first scenes is just him laying, suspended mid-air, and spinning around like he just doesn't care. I actually like this a lot.
Those alone are, in my opinion, worth the price of admission of watching an action movie. I'm a sucker for action scenes, and this movie delivers.
The rest of the movie, though? It's just bad. Like, Grade-A bad. There's a huge, significant retooling of the Ghost Rider mythos that's established in 2007, with the flashbacks showcasing a different set of events to the first movie (with Johnny willingly signing on the deal, something that IMO is an improvement if the movie would actually deal with it). Roxanne isn't mentioned anywhere, Mephisto has been recasted as Ciaran Hinds and is called Roarke for some reason.
Nicholas Cage's looniness ends up not working in his favour this time around, as his attempts to be oh-so-wacky doesn't work at all (although his psychotic grinning and laughing as he plays bad cop to interrogate someone is amazingly done), and he co-stars opposite Violante Placido as Nadya Ketch, mother to Mephisto's son, and the huge plot of the movie is that Johnny Blaze's befriended the devil's son, Danny, and is adamant at protecting him at all costs -- and he faces off first against a bunch of human bounty hunters led by Nadya's ex-boyfriend Carrigan, and later when Carrigan gets transformed into the demonic decay-controlling supervillain Blackout. Oh, and Idris Elba hams it up as Moreau, Johnny's ally as a drunk French monk that's part of a church sect trying to prevent some vague prophecy from coming.
In-between it all, Johnny yearns to be rid of the Ghost Rider, which Danny isn't okay with. We get some weird, poorly-stylized flashes to a bunch of badly-animated sequences where we get backstory on Johnny Blaze, Roarke/Mephisto and Zarathros, the angel that was turned into the Ghost Rider. Nothing really gels from a thematic point, none of the plot's supposed big emotional moments really manage to hit, and we just clumsily stumble from one action point to another. Idris Elba dies, Blackout dies (or gets turned into 'roadkill', as the Rider notes), Danny shows off his powers and refuses to be Mephisto's new vessel, gives Johnny his powers back, and then Johnny sends Mephisto back to hell. Oh, and he gets some blue flames at the end of the movie, apparently Zaratros's angelic-ness having been restored.
Somewhere in this movie, we've got not one, but two scenes of the Ghost Rider pissing fire. It's ridiculous, but it's nowhere as funny as the movie thinks it is.
Overall? It's a gigantic trainwreck of a movie. The action scenes and the inhuman creepiness of this movie's Ghost Rider is amazingly on-point, but you don't have to sit through the movie to watch any of those. Trust me -- just google the action scenes from YouTube, and spare yourself the rest of this insanely bland and poorly-executed nonsense.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance suffers from basically the same problems. The slight retooling to Ghost Rider's appearance compared to the 2007 movie is definitely neat. I'm not the biggest fan of the Rider ditching his 'nice jacket', and his new jacket and bike look like they're half melted... but I'm definitely a huge fun of his flame-bleached black skull, as well as his inhuman jerking and moving around -- most unsettlingly seen when the Ghost Rider first appears in this movie to murder a bunch of random mooks. The visuals in this movie is amazingly done, and while the previous movie relied on having Ghost Rider appear exclusively at night to highlight the amazingness of his flaming skull, the final action scene is a road chase that takes place in the day, which is pretty damn awesome to watch.
Plus, one of the middle scenes in the movie is Ghost Rider riding a big-ass mining machine, empowering it with the flames of hell and using it to murder everyone while Ghost Rider just cackles on the control station. The Ghost Rider in this movie is just straight-up positively inhuman when he's not being an action hero, and one of his first scenes is just him laying, suspended mid-air, and spinning around like he just doesn't care. I actually like this a lot.
Those alone are, in my opinion, worth the price of admission of watching an action movie. I'm a sucker for action scenes, and this movie delivers.
The rest of the movie, though? It's just bad. Like, Grade-A bad. There's a huge, significant retooling of the Ghost Rider mythos that's established in 2007, with the flashbacks showcasing a different set of events to the first movie (with Johnny willingly signing on the deal, something that IMO is an improvement if the movie would actually deal with it). Roxanne isn't mentioned anywhere, Mephisto has been recasted as Ciaran Hinds and is called Roarke for some reason.
Nicholas Cage's looniness ends up not working in his favour this time around, as his attempts to be oh-so-wacky doesn't work at all (although his psychotic grinning and laughing as he plays bad cop to interrogate someone is amazingly done), and he co-stars opposite Violante Placido as Nadya Ketch, mother to Mephisto's son, and the huge plot of the movie is that Johnny Blaze's befriended the devil's son, Danny, and is adamant at protecting him at all costs -- and he faces off first against a bunch of human bounty hunters led by Nadya's ex-boyfriend Carrigan, and later when Carrigan gets transformed into the demonic decay-controlling supervillain Blackout. Oh, and Idris Elba hams it up as Moreau, Johnny's ally as a drunk French monk that's part of a church sect trying to prevent some vague prophecy from coming.
In-between it all, Johnny yearns to be rid of the Ghost Rider, which Danny isn't okay with. We get some weird, poorly-stylized flashes to a bunch of badly-animated sequences where we get backstory on Johnny Blaze, Roarke/Mephisto and Zarathros, the angel that was turned into the Ghost Rider. Nothing really gels from a thematic point, none of the plot's supposed big emotional moments really manage to hit, and we just clumsily stumble from one action point to another. Idris Elba dies, Blackout dies (or gets turned into 'roadkill', as the Rider notes), Danny shows off his powers and refuses to be Mephisto's new vessel, gives Johnny his powers back, and then Johnny sends Mephisto back to hell. Oh, and he gets some blue flames at the end of the movie, apparently Zaratros's angelic-ness having been restored.
Somewhere in this movie, we've got not one, but two scenes of the Ghost Rider pissing fire. It's ridiculous, but it's nowhere as funny as the movie thinks it is.
Overall? It's a gigantic trainwreck of a movie. The action scenes and the inhuman creepiness of this movie's Ghost Rider is amazingly on-point, but you don't have to sit through the movie to watch any of those. Trust me -- just google the action scenes from YouTube, and spare yourself the rest of this insanely bland and poorly-executed nonsense.
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