Ghost Rider

Comic book movies are a grand little segment of the Hollywood industry for a number of reasons. First of all, there is lots of source material. All you have to do is peek your head into a comic book shop to see that, I wouldn’t recommend anything more than a quick peek however, they are somewhat frightening stores!
Not only is there a lot of pre-made stories and characters just ripe for the filming, a lot of the material is actually quite good. Sadly the page to screen transfer too often reduces the quality significantly.
Second of all, the stories are already cinematic in their nature. The plots are all basically good versus evil, this being one of the most simplistic and celebrated kinds of stories. The fact that the stories come in serial form provides easy ending points for movies, and of course the promise of potential sequels.
Unlike the adaptation of a standard novel, a comic book adaptation benefits from the fact that thousands of images and scenes have already been created in the numerous strips and have only to be translated into live images. So much storyboarding, all you need is a comic book, a pair of scissors and a first grade ability to cut along the lines.
Thirdly, and for studios most importantly, a comic book movie has a built in audience. In fact it has a few. There are the people who read the original comic books, however long ago that might have been. There are the people who enjoy colorful, loud, and action-filled cinema. And, depending upon the actors involved, there are the people who will come to see their tinsel town crush in a tight superhero outfit.
There has been a ever growing wave of comic book adaptations in the past few years, a renaissance, if you will, that began around the time of the first live action X-Men movie. Spider-Man followed to huge monetary success, and then came The Hulk, Batman, The Fantastic Four, and Superman. They don’t all fall into the PG-13 category either, graphic novels became fodder for cinema and we saw the more mature kinds of films like Road to Perdition, The Punisher, Sin City, A History of Violence, V for Vendetta, and the very promising “300” due out in March.
The more widely recognized heroes have been brought to theaters world wide, so it comes as no surprise that studios have begun churning out movies based on lesser known comic books. Here enters the most recent cinematic offering, “Ghost
Rider.”
This time it’s Nicholas Cage’s turn to don a cheesy outfit and save the world, though his costume is mercifully tame compared to some. It’s not his leather jacket that distinguishes him after all; it’s the burning skull for a head.
The story goes that Johnny Blaze, a stunt rider like his father, sells his soul to the devil to save his dad from lung cancer. The cancer is gone, but his dad bites it shortly thereafter and instead of leaving with his girlfriend, Roxanne Simpson, Johnny begins a life of insane stunt riding in an attempt to prove to himself that he won’t live in fear.
Many years later Johnny is still living dangerously and Roxanne is a hot reporter who reenters his life on the day it pretty much goes to hell. The devil’s son, along with his punk demon buddies, decides he’s going to come to earth to collect a bunch of damned souls and by doing so earn the right to unleash his own little version of hell on earth. It seems that Johnny isn’t the only son who takes after his dad.
The devil isn’t too happy about this (he wants those souls for himself) so he summons the aid of Johnny, AKA the Ghost Rider, to act as his personal bounty hunter and do away with the demon gang on earth.
What follows is a pretty by the (comic) books movie featuring plenty of wild action, inconvenient and ignored plot holes, and lots of very exaggerated physical action, undoubtedly taken directly from the frames of the original work.
It’s not a really bad movie, though it’s not a really good one either, certainly not when compared to the best of the comic book adaptations, such as the Spider-Man movies. Be that as it may, it was sufficiently entertaining, thanks in large part to Nicholas Cage who has a knack for turning the worst of Hollywood drivel into semi decent fare.
The dialogue was groan inducing at times (as was Eva Mendes, though in a different sort of way) but I find this to be true of actual comic books as well. To the filmmakers’ credit, the actors playing the young Johnny and Roxanne actually looked like they might be young versions of the older leads, something that is far too often unseen in films.
“Ghost Rider” wasn’t the best we’ve ever seen, but in the down time between Christmas and summertime big budget blockbusters, it’s passable entertainment, and a decent use of an afternoon.

B-