Just saw Ghostrider, loved it!

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2007)

I've heard that Nicolas Cage offered to pay for a chance to audition to be Ghostrider. It shows -- the man clearly loves the character, and is obviously having a ball playing Johnny Blaze.
The special effects were spectacular. I particularly enjoyed the transformations from Johnny Blaze to Ghostrider, which were nicely handled, and the demons -- especially the water demon.
The writing could have been a bit better. I enjoyed the movie enough to forgive the few problems I noticed. There were a couple of scenes that left you saying, "Wait -- what?" but the movie was entertaining enough and fast-paced enough that you could generally over-look those bits and just enjoy the ride. The characters suffered somewhat due to the fast pace, though, I think. A lot of movie time was necessarily spent on back story, and setting up the plot, but some character development, especially Roxanne's, suffered for it. She ended up basically being a cookie-cutter love interest.
Over all, I must say that I enjoyed the movie. It was funny, scary in places, action-packed, and generally an all-around good time. I expect that fans of the book will complain about the canon having been "butchered", but frankly, you have to expect some rewriting of the history. Any comic good enough to rate a movie is going to have a metric ton of history behind it, and you have to rewrite and truncate that history to fit it into a ninety minute movie. I think the writers did quite well with Ghostrider's back story, and I think they did a great job with the movie over all. Here's hoping for sequels!