An unhinged Nicolas Cage playing a hellfire demon; Idris Elba taking on a drunk monk with crazy eyes; Ciarán Hinds in the new form of the devil; and a scene involving the titular hero pissing fire. All in one superhero movie and captured through the eyes of the Crank duo, Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine, that sounds like nonstop mayhem. And all of those factors, on paper, sound like the ultimate action movie, with little-to-no-chance of failure. So, now having seen the final result, the one baffling question has risen: What happened?
Unlike plenty of projects, wherein a seemingly perfect match of talent and material go terribly wrong, that question is all too easy to answer in this case. For starters, there’s the threadbare story, the shoddy stakes, the lack of scope, the clumsy structure, and one painfully passive villain. Yet, amazingly, that doesn’t even encapsulate everything that went wrong with this disappointing reboot.
Smartly so — and that’s only time I will use that description — Neveldine and Taylor slightly tweaked the origin of Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider (Nicolas Cage), as shown by a hit and miss opening credits sequence, which includes five-year-old YouTube and Jerry Springer jokes. The directing duo threw away the light and goofy tone director Mark Steven Johnson established in the first installment, and instead attempted for a darker and, oddly, more cartoonish vibe.
The story picks up a few years later, after Johnny’s been dealing with the Ghost Rider. The curse is something he’s come to both love and hate, an interesting dichotomy that’s given a half-baked treatment. His life seems to solely involve living in a dark room in the middle of nowhere, at least until Moreau (Idris Elba) somehow finds him, offering the chance to lose the curse. For that to happen, he has to go find a demon child (an easy-seeming task) and protect him from the devil (another easy-seeming task).
That’s it. That’s the whole, small-stakes story. Will the demon child raise hell on earth? No, the devil will just take over his body to continue his job. It’s played as a big deal, but even the devil himself couldn’t come off as caring less. There’s been some legendarily weak superhero villains and, in terms of storytelling, this not-so-antagonistic villain ranks down there with the worst of them.
He sticks to hanging on the sideline and, for some reason, lets a team of incompetent mercenaries try to capture the kid. Despite being the devil, he just sits around and waits to see what happens. By the end, when he gets involved, the devil continues his passive and powerless streak; when he has a chance to take a shot at Johnny Blaze, he just gives an extra-hard push. As the film tells it, that’s all this villain is capable of. Ciarán Hinds adds a certain level of legitimacy to the role and has some fun come the third act, but he’s overshadowed by poor script decisions.
One of those many questionable storytelling choices even comes down to the lead. There’s an attempt at making the stakes personal for the character, but, like the rest of the film, it falls flat. If Johnny saves the boy, he’ll lose the curse. When it’s gone, events start to get worse. Here’s the problem: you know he’s not going to lose this power forever. He’ll get it back, especially when it matters at the end. Script ideas such as that have no chance, thanks to the power of preconceptions.
If anything could have been the film’s saving grace, it would have been the lunacy of Nicolas Cage. Neveldine and Taylor let him run wild, yes, but it’s not as affective as one would hope. It’s all silliness for silliness’ sake. That’s acceptable in plenty of cases, but Cage has proven himself capable of giving much more accomplished, heightened performances. What makes his more manic and unique characters work, like in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Kick-Ass, is Cage’s skill in infusing a human element into these larger-than-life characters. Here, he hits all the beats one expects; nothing is fresh, new, or fun to dissect on an intellectual level.
Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance is only a mere 95 minutes long and feels like twice that, partly because, for a film that’s so frantic in its storytelling, it’s a slog to endure. Even in terms of action, there’s no excitement. The stilted set pieces are repetitive, jarringly paced, and all involve characters you could care less about. If it wasn’t for Idris Elba acting as if he’s in a much cooler movie, this superhero pic would be a near-disaster.
Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance is now in wide release.