The critics are right

Rating: 1/10 (11 March 2007)

This was one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. The setup is OK (the "origin")but there's no follow-through. The movie is essentially plot less, and the villains are stick figures who are easily dispatched. Wes Bentley, burdened with some awful makeup and tricked up to look like a pasty-faced Elvis impersonator, is given little to do. He is never threatening and our hero (so to speak) has little trouble wrapping things up.
Ghost Rider tries to be funny, with some howlingly bad dialogue (I admit, I laughed most of the way through, which has to count for something), but it's never more than a caricature of itself. Even a comic book movie has to have something for the audience to identify with. Spider Man 2 was a strong picture largely because Alfred Molina's characterization of Doctor Octopus had a human dimension.
Yes, character and story matter even in "fun" pictures. There's little to enjoy here other than some visual effects, and that's not worth the price of a movie ticket. I was ready to leave an hour before it ended; it is that boring.
As for the adaptation, I'm not a purist, but there was nothing of what made the comic book exciting (at least in the first couple of years). Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog, who created the character, put him in a situation in which he was struggling for redemption. There's no sense of any tension between good and evil in the movie; it's just Cage being doggedly Cage-ish and wisecracking his way through a limp, lifeless, by-the-numbers formula picture.
I'd rate this one at the bottom of the heap for the genre. I can forgive lapses in logic and corny dialogue, but just don't bore me. That's all I ask. Ghost Rider darned near put me to sleep.