Roundly mediocre film that never really engaged me

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2007)

As a teenager , Johnny Blaze naively makes a deal with the devil in order to cure his father's cancer. When his father is cured but dies in a motorcycle stunt, Johnny lashes out at the Devil but ultimately accepts his fate. As an adult he has forged a great career for himself as a motorcycle stuntman thanks to his strange inability to be killed in any of his outrageous stunts. However when the Devil's son Blackheart comes to conquer the world, the Devil chooses his moment to summon Blaze as his "Ghost Rider"  his demonic messenger  to stop him.
At no point did I really expect this film to be any good but I did hope that at least it would be quite entertaining and thus I hired it on DVD. I wasn't prepared for quite how mediocre it would be though and I found myself losing interest more and more as it went on. The plot is the source of the problem as it does seem to plod along without any real sense of event or spectacle. At times it has its moments which are quite impressive (and were used heavily for promo and trailers) but it is the rest of the film that doesn't offer a great deal. The story doesn't grip or engage and it is quite dull at times; it doesn't help that there are no characters (good or evil) to really care about or root for and what I found myself left with was just a lot of special effects that play like cut scenes from a video game.
The effects are technically impressive but they do lack heart and I felt almost no "wow" factor on any level. At first it seemed cool but it got old quickly. It night have avoided this by making Blaze more of a person before he became an effect, but this doesn't happen. This leaves all the action quite cold in the delivery and I wasn't actually that bothered by it since I had never been bought into the story. Cage isn't able to find a character and just ends up delivery a rather obvious performance. He also fails to make his Rider have much in the way of character  it was never going to be easy but it didn't help to be stiff and unconvincing even before your head turns into an effect. Fonda is a reasonably nice bit of casting but has limited impact. Bentley lacks presence and threat as the Devil's son, which again undermines the action and story. Mendes suffers from a lack of material and we learnt here that she can only get so far with her playful brand of sexiness; true she is the most fun part of the film and she is a great presence but she has little to do and no real character to speak of.
Overall then, a pretty mediocre and lacklustre film. It does the basics and has solid effects but where is the heart? Where are the characters or indeed any strong emotion of any sort whether it be love, hate, desire, vengeance or anything? Without any of these I'm afraid that the film pretty much fails to spark at any point.