good campy film

Rating: 7/10 (9 October 2007)

Nobody will be saying that "Ghost Rider" is the best cinematic achievement of 2007 in future years. But I will personally say it was one of the more enjoyable films to see at a drive-in, and it does hold up pretty well with a few drinks and a DVD as well. Cage is in full-on Elvis mode in this film; he even resurrects the famous finger point from "Wild at Heart" for this film. It's great to see Cage in a fun movie again, and he seems to be having fun in it  his performance as stunt-rider Johnny Blaze, who made a crooked deal with the devil to save his father from cancer and is now forced to become the devil's bounty-hunter, has just the right amount of dignity and humor. The way the film is set up basically makes it a "white trash" superhero movie. Cage is paired with Eva Mendez, who plays his high-school sweetheart who he had to leave because of his deal with Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda). Yes, the devil truly is a main character in this film, and his son (Wes Bentley) gets in on the action too; after his escape Blaze is sent to hunt him down and bring him to the devil's own justice.
The Rider's coolest trick is when he looks into the eyes of a criminal and cause the evildoer to feel all the pain of his victims. Oh yeah, and let's not forget the fact that his head turns into a burning skull. He's also got a really cool bike, I guess. I don't really know because I'm not a big car/bike person. But what I did enjoy was the carnival setting for the early scenes and the way that theme carried over to the modern sequences  Johnny Blaze is definitely a show-off, but in a fun way. I liked the silly scene where he stops traffic to declare his love for Mendez' character.
I guess what really sells the film for me is Fonda as the devil and Sam Elliott as his nemesis representing the forces of good. This is smart B-movie-making, giving the audience 2 polar opposite authority figures and casting them with dynamic iconic actors who can hold the kind of weight on screen that such a role demands. This is reminiscent of George Lucas' casting for Star Wars, with iconic actors Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness holding down these types of authority roles in his film, and a lot of films followed this lead with varying degrees of success. Here it is particularly pleasing because of the iconic associations between Fonda and the "bad boy" biker scene of the 1960s through his association with "Easy Rider" and Elliott's association with Western films which is another element of this film's fantasy.
The secondary villains played by Bentley and others were far less effective and made me feel a bit like I was watching some kind of television fantasy like "Charmed." The scene where they went into a honky-tonk reminded me very much of "Terminator 2" except for the fact that Bentley doesn't have the kind of screen presence to make the scene memorable. This is the only aspect of the film that just didn't work for me.
Since I have some space I will respond to some of the comments on this board -- it seems like some people are trying to analyze it far too much and make sense of things that in my opinion are just humorous and silly and therefore enjoyable. One person even complained that it wasn't a superior film in the mold of "Pan's Labrynth." It is pretty amazing to think that this movie cost over $100 million, and this type of extreme action/fantasy story would have been done on a much lower budget and received much less scrutiny in the pre-Star Wars age. So many "blockbusters" take themselves too seriously. I saw this the same night at the same drive-in where I saw "Spider-Man 3" and this film was very fresh, fun, and suitably light compared to that film. It takes itself just seriously enough that kids will enjoy the action and scares while adults will easily see the intentional humor. I can understand if someone didn't like the movie because it's not the type of thing that everyone enjoys and, as I said, in another age these kind of movies didn't get the kind of criticism they get now because they didn't have the same stars as "serious" movies and they didn't have the huge budget and exposure that they do now. Nobody slammed "Planet of the Vampires" because they saw the star of the movie in some kind of serious drama one time and felt that he was "slumming." But we don't have "B movie stars" anymore, and I respect an actor like Cage who obviously knows his craft and applies his skills in a way that's appropriate to the subject matter and style of any film he's involved in. I'm fine with movies about dudes with names like "Spider-Man" and "Bat-Man" that want to make some kind of point about the fleeting nature of fame, personal responsibility, right and wrong, etc. Whatever. But it's pretty ridiculous that so many people nowadays actually EXPECT a fantasy movie to be some kind of treatise on morality or some kind of dramatic character story. Maybe it's because movies like "LOTR" actually pulled it off, but I don't go into every fantasy movie expecting an epic discourse on the nature of good and evil. This is just a film about a biker dude with a flaming skull and a magic bike. If you go into this film just expecting a campy thrill-ride I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's a feast for the eyes and it has a charming way of approaching the more ridiculous aspects of the story.