Could the Rider Be Burnedout Before His Next Outing?

Rating: 5/10 (19 February 2007)

So I went to see long awaited film adaptation of Ghost Rider. I can't say that I was excited about it. I did want to see this movie but I wanted to see Hannibal Rising more but you know how it is with popular vote plus we had a six year old with us. The movie goes off of the premise that Mephisto, a.k.a. the Devil, made a pact with some town that ended in the townspeople turning on each other. So the Rider of the era is sent to retrieve the contract made between the people and Mephisto. However this backfires and the Rider makes off with it supposedly "outrunning the Devil". Fast forward to Johnny and dear old dad performing in their stunt show. Dad has cancer, Johnny makes deal with the Devil, dad is saved but dies the same day from an accident, throw in the whole subplot of young lovers running away together and you pretty much got the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Now Johnny is now famous for his stunts and so on and so forth, Roxanne reappears in his life but he can't fully connect with her because Mephisto has returned to call on Johnny to hunt down his son Blackheart. Blackheart wants to the contract to supposedly help him take over the world and he's using the Hidden to help him.
Okay now that I'm done with plot let's get down to the movie. First off the starts okay but the whole young lovers thing was well...lame. Then you add in the fact that the main villains don't transform into their true selves at any point in the movie. The Hidden are easily defeated in mere seconds and the dialog is just terrible. This movie should have been darker and should have done away with some of the terrible humor. I gotta say with the humor I was very unimpressed. Also take the fact that Blackheart is the worst thing to come out of hell since Mephisto and he's rarely does anything that can be considered terrifying. Look Blackheart is supposed to be huge and almost undefeated heck even GR had an extremely hard time fighting him. However in this movie Blackheart is defeated with little effort. All of the battles in this film are anti-climactic. I kept waiting for the big final showdown and it didn't come. Plus the Rider is not limited to the darkness. The Rider and Blaze are two separate beings and the Rider takes over pretty much whenever it wants. Blaze is rarely even aware of when this happens.
The Penance Stare, while impressive, was overdone in this movie. It's not supposed to kill the target but doom them to a life of pain and misery equivalent to the pain they've caused others. Cage is a good actor no doubt but he was miscast in this. What really did this movie in was the rating. PG-13 is good for superhero fair such as X-Men and Spiderman but with subject matter like this it should have been R but no they once again had to sellout and make to where the kids could see it. Question is how many children born after the early nineties are going to be old enough to even know who Ghost Rider is? It's not like he's one of the most publicized heroes around. This should have been done for the viewers who were old enough to vote. It should have been dark. Eva Mendes, who is always stunning, was just that and only that in this movie. With the bad dialog she was forced to play the stereotypical D.I.D. In short the movie was just way too rushed.
Now that the criticisms are out of the way time to get on to the positives. The special effects were fair. Ghost Rider was rendered nicely and the Hidden were okay but Blackheart was not impressive at all. All they did was turn him blue and give him red eyes and that's it. The flame effects were cool. I like how they gave the impression of speed and the extreme heat the rider gives off. Plus the bike was excellent and the chains were believable. Not to mention Ghost Rider's voice would scare the crap out of me were he real. That roar of his is flesh melting and I like the strange sense of insanity that he possesses. Another good thing was the insertion of the precursor to Blaze's Ghost Rider Carter Slade, who was released in his own comics years before Ghost Rider's comics began being released. This of course at most is only an inside thing since anyone who hasn't read the comics most likely won't know it. I really liked his Ghost Rider form. Too bad however towards the ending it gets a bit preachy with the constant references to heaven and what not and with lines like "He may have my soul but he doesn't have my spirit." which was hokey at best. Also the scene where Rider gives the cops the finger as he rides off. The only real eye-catchers are all the building scenes that depict the Rider riding around on them on his bike, and the prison scene. Other than that the others are pretty average. For the most part this movie is just supposed to be cheap fun to go to when you've got some time to kill. You shouldn't be expecting too much since these movies are only designed to showcase how far we've gotten in special effects and that's really all that can be said. So if you just want to be entertained for a few bucks go see Ghost Rider. It's fun but that's all it is. P.S. With every superhero action film the last few second of footage are supposed to showoff the abilities of the hero. It happened with Spiderman and other Marvel films. So all things considered this too was a disappointment.