Review: Ghost Rider 2 - Spirit of Vengeance

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance feels like it came from the same infernal filing department as Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, Punisher: War Zone, and whatever happens with the forthcoming Daredevil reboot. There’s an abacus in a demon’s claw somewhere well below us, which figures out how many wanna-badass fanboys on crystal meth will go see a sequel to a franchise that never quite took off but never exactly died either. If that abacus has X many beads on the left but Y many beads on the right, a big orange fire alarm goes off just to the right of Satan’s fifth wife, and Hollywood says “Yep, make another one.” I never saw Ghost Rider 1 (or Crank or Crank 2, for that matter), but the notion of the Crank guys retooling the Daredevil guy’s first stab at a movie about an earthbound demon on a flaming motorcycle kicking ass and hauling justice just sorta appeals to me. As they say in GR2, it’s all about the deal.

Lemme see. Johnny Pumpkinhead (Nicolas Cage) gets yanked out of retirement (?) by Idris Elba, who after a solid turn in Thor and a not-too-shabby alternate role here, should probably get signed up for every Marvel movie ever. It seems the Devil (Ciaran Hinds) is after a young boy, and has dispatched a demon called Blackout (Johnny Whitworth) after him. Blackout might conceivably have it worse than the Ghost Rider – where GR pisses (and, presumably, ejaculates) in jets of liquid flame, Blackout instantaneously decays all living matter he comes into contact with. My point: neither of these guys are getting laid.

The film moves like a greased weasel with its tail on fire, i.e. rapidly and with great terror, which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. While I might frequently have experienced the mental equivalent of whiplash at having to keep up with how Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were framing/cutting their action, I can also scarcely complain that Spirit of Vengeance overstayed its welcome. It’s a C-movie whose only aspiration in life is to be a solid B-movie, and there’s charm in that. It was in 3-D, which I guess matters in situations like this, but like most other 3-D, added nothing to the experience. (Ghost Rider, by dint of his illuminated cranium, can at least be tracked visually in even the darkest sunglass-wearing 3-D scenes.)

The story is partially by David Goyer, who helped rejuvenate the Batman franchise, and the screenplay does its best to create a workable arc and some mythic wham-bams for its demon-possessed anti-hero. It’s dumb stuff by design, but this doesn’t stop Johnny Blaze from cracking wise with an appreciable hit count, nor Nicolas Cage from doing his I’M NICOLAS FUCKING CAGE thing at the same level of commitment we have come to know and love. The guy was once on deck to play Superman; such a thing is nigh unimaginable from my current vantage point. This actor was born to make you believe a man with his head on fire could fly down the open road.