Ghost Rider

Movie poster for Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider

Although it's only about a decade old, Ghost Rider was such a misfire for Marvel, that they pretty much like to pretend it never happened.

It's true critics slammed the film, but audiences liked it enough to justify a sequel, and there's a reason for that - slamming Ghost Rider is a little like picking on the special ed kid - it's an easy target.

Ghost Rider is based on the Marvel comic of the same name. In 1973 Marvel updated one of it's Golden Age properties, "Ghost Rider", a Western hero, hoping for the same success it had in updating other pre-Marvel legacy characters like The Human Torch, Ant-Man, and Sub-Mariner. The series had some cult success, lasting about a decade, but the comic itself was never as memorable as the incredible unique look of the titular anti-hero, Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle rider dressed in black leather with a flaming skull for a head.

Honestly, for most of it's life, the Ghost Rider comics were little more than forgettable diversions, with perhaps the most memorable issue coming near the end of the series when Roger Stern retold Ghost Rider's origin in issue #68 with a clever wraparound story with a twist ending set in a church.

So, right off the bat a movie adaptation was going to be... problematic. There's really no way you can make a two hour film where the protagonist is a talking, flaming skull not look cheesy, no matter how good the effects.

Then there's the casting. Nicolas Cage was chosen for Johnny Blaze, and though he's spent his entire career cultivating a motorcycle bad-boy pose, it's always seemed affected. His love interest is a similarly miscast Eva Mendes, who is way too much of a bombshell to play the middle-American girl next door type. Mendes probably regrets diving into comic films at all, as Ghost Rider and The Spirit were back-to-back flops that seem to have derailed her career.

So it would have been easy for Ghost Rider to be a complete disaster. But it wasn't. The film's saving grace comes from it's willingness to embrace it's own B movie-ness. By concentrating on action sequences, and giving Nic Cage cheesy one-liners and dialogue so cliche that it can't possibly be taken seriously, the film manages to save itself. And while the principal casting left a lot to be desired, the casting of supporting roles was spot on, including real cowboy cred in the form of Sam Elliot as the original Western Ghost Rider, and real biker cred in the form of Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles.

The film had a massive budget which was wisely sunk almost entirely into special effects, given that the acting wasn't going to carry this script. Yes, flaming skull head is cheesy, but it works. And the film is further dressed up with a great soundtrack, including a musical score by horror specialist Christopher Young, and songs by the likes of Ozzy and ZZ Top, and of course an updated version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky".

So while Ghost Rider pales in comparison to the high quality Marvel Studios films we've come to expect every summer since, it is at least as good - if not better - than most of it's fellow mid-2000s, special effects-driven, supernatural action thrillers like Underworld, Van Helsing, Constantine, etc.

*** out of *****