Reviews by Matt

When he was young, Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) sold his soul to save his father. Now he is the Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter. It is his job to collect the souls owed to the devil (Peter Fonda). When the devil’s son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) comes to earth to take over, Johnny Blaze is called upon to become the Ghost Rider and stop him.

“Ghost Rider” is the latest in the line of comic book movies and while it not as good as “Spider-Man” or “X-Men,” it is not as bad as “The Hulk” or “Daredevil.” My advice, should you go to see this movie is, don’t expect too much. The cheesy dialogue and an awkward love story are what keep this from being able to contend with its more successful predecessors. The problem is that to be successful, comic book movies have to offer something that everyone can enjoy and “Ghost Rider” was just to comic “booky” to find the success that “Spider-Man” has had. A lot of the dialogue was cheesy and full of clichés. Some of the lines from “Ghost Rider” you would expect to hear Adam West say in the 1960’s Batman television show. One of Blackheart’s cronies lives in the wind and when he gets into a fight with Ghost Rider he says “you can’t capture the wind,” then laughs an evil laugh. It was one step away from seeing “pow” whenever someone got hit.

The thing about acting is that you are supposed to separate yourself from your character, and while I like Nicholas Cage under most circumstances, there was very little separation between the person he is and the character he was playing. Johnny Blaze acted and sounded too much like Nick Cage for there to be any way to forget that he was supposed to be acting. I sat in the theater and thought, “Why is Nicholas Cage going to jump all those helicopters? That just seems unnecessary.”


As lacking as Nick Cage was, Eva Mendes, who plays Roxanne, Johnny’s love interest, was even more so. She was hired for two reasons and I’ll let you figure out what those were. (Think anatomically). She was just so dull; it was like watching paint dry whenever she was on screen.

Non-acting aside, the special effects in this movie looked really good. Ghost Rider is the best part of the movie. Personally I think that the movie could have used more of that character and less of Nicholas “I’m not even trying anymore” Cage. It is not a good sign that the best acting in the movie was done by a computer-generated character. I have heard that the flame effect has always been the hardest to do digitally because of the nature of fire. Even a small breeze affects how it looks. The flames that engulf the skull head of Ghost Rider, looks and acts just as fire should. With every thing else going on in this movie, the special effects could have been a whole lot worse.

Overall this movie was disappointing. The dialogue was cheesy and predictable, the love story was forced and mostly unnecessary, the main actors barely seemed to try, but the special effects were good. Not worth the outrageous price of a movie ticket at Regal though. I don’t know that much about the history of Ghost Rider, but I’m fairly certain that purists will be very disappointed with the movie. Long and short of it is, just wait for the DVD.

6/10
Rated PG-13 for horror violence and disturbing images.
Runtime: :114 min