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| As you can surmise from the title, there is nothing new here |
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Unnecessary sequel adds nothing new
The 2007 Nic Cage vehicle (see what I did there?) Ghost Rider was a worthwhile, if low-rent Marvel Knights™ (licensed out by Marvel) film that fell well below the quality of the Marvel Studios™ in-house productions that began showing up the following year with the Iron Man, but was still far superior to the Marvel movies and made-for-TV movie of the week specials of the 70s and 80s. The 2011 sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance however falls squarely around the quality level of the best of those lackluster early efforts such as the 1989 Dolph Lundgren film The Punisher.
While Nic Cage reprises his role as Johnny Cage, this film looks and feels quite different from its predecessor. The character design of Ghost Rider gets an upgrade - he no longer has a (comics accurate) white flaming skull, but now has a charcoal black skull, and similarly his shiny black leathers are replaced by what looks like charred black leather. Unfortunately that's the extent of the upgrades to this film.
The chain forked, pan head custom Harley-Davidson chopper of the first film is replaced here with some sort of Mad Max-ish Yamaha, and that right there symbolizes the kind of downgrade the whole movie gets. All classic American Western elements of that elevated the first film a bit are gone as the production was shot on location in the much more slashed budget friendly Romania and Turkey.
The film's biggest crime is a total lack of acknowledgement of it's predecessor. Instead of Mephistopheles played by Peter Fonda, we get a different demon played by a different actor (Ciaran Hinds) that somehow claims to be the one that Johnny Blaze sold his soul to, and flashback scenes were shot to retrofit him into the story. Also Blaze's motivation in this film is to get rid of his Ghost Rider curse, even though at the end of the last film he was offered just that by Mephistopheles, and his chose just the opposite - to remain Ghost Rider - and nothing in this film explains how or why he changed his mind.
Lacking any of the charm of the original Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is pretty much just moves from action sequence to CGI sequence and back for most of its hour and a half running time, making it a passable diversion at best.
**1/2 out of *****
The chain forked, pan head custom Harley-Davidson chopper of the first film is replaced here with some sort of Mad Max-ish Yamaha, and that right there symbolizes the kind of downgrade the whole movie gets. All classic American Western elements of that elevated the first film a bit are gone as the production was shot on location in the much more slashed budget friendly Romania and Turkey.
The film's biggest crime is a total lack of acknowledgement of it's predecessor. Instead of Mephistopheles played by Peter Fonda, we get a different demon played by a different actor (Ciaran Hinds) that somehow claims to be the one that Johnny Blaze sold his soul to, and flashback scenes were shot to retrofit him into the story. Also Blaze's motivation in this film is to get rid of his Ghost Rider curse, even though at the end of the last film he was offered just that by Mephistopheles, and his chose just the opposite - to remain Ghost Rider - and nothing in this film explains how or why he changed his mind.
Lacking any of the charm of the original Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is pretty much just moves from action sequence to CGI sequence and back for most of its hour and a half running time, making it a passable diversion at best.
**1/2 out of *****
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