Ghost Rider
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: February 19, 2007

I used to read Ghost Rider, the comic book, when I was a boy. At that age, there was maybe nothing more appealing to me than a leather-clad skeleton with his skull on fire tearing around on a demonic motorbike. Now along comes Ghost Rider the motion picture, and this film is certain to have detractors who won’t even bother to see it. After all, some people just don’t care for animated skeletons, motorcycle stunts, or Nicolas Cage. But what about those of us who do? What about those of us who bought a ticket to Ghost Rider and took a seat in the theater, perfectly willing to let the movie entertain us? I would have gleefully watched that flaming motorcycle scale up the sides of buildings, blaze molten furrows down the city streets, and cut swaths of fire through the desert, frying roadside iguanas in its wake. I really was excited that this bizarre comic book had been made into a movie. Makers of Ghost Rider, I may not be your demographic, but I am the adult they will some day become. And I’m here to tell you, your movie disappoints.

For starters, the director cuts the film like a trailer for itself, with flash edits and meaningless pounding noises that desperately and cynically stab at the attention span, as if all hope of entertaining us had been abandoned, and instead we had been targeted for brainwashing.

Also, there are some shaky plot elements. For instance, what are all of Ghost Rider’s powers, and how does he discover them, and how does he know they will work, and who are these foes he is vanquishing, and what is at stake in this conflict? Folks, I am not being overly-fussy in demanding answers to these questions. There is simply no dramatic tension in a conflict when it’s not clear in what way the participants are vulnerable. In battle after battle, the hero of this film seems to accidentally manufacture a way to dispatch his otherwise invincible, supernatural adversaries. “Un-satisfying” is too kind a word for this kind of screenwriting tactic.

This film stars Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider, a stuntman who sells his soul to the devil but otherwise never commits a foul deed in his life. Peter Fonda plays a joyless, un-charismatic, un-persuasive, and seemingly immobile Satan. Sam Elliot plays some kind of eternal cowboy gravedigger sage. And Eva Mendes stars as her own cleavage.

Ghost Rider also features Wes Bentley as a villainous demon who takes a lot of lives in pursuit of a vague, sinister agenda. That’s the same Wes Bentley who seemed to embody a little cinematic revolution eight years ago as the young hero of American Beauty. In that film he showed us a videotape of a plastic bag floating in the wind, and told us of Beauty, and its power to overwhelm him with the everyday, unexpected, nearly invisible incarnation. Now, in Ghost Rider, Wes Bentley punches and kicks a CGI skeleton with a flaming skull. Talk about losing one’s soul.

It may seem like I’m taking my review of Ghost Rider too seriously. But a super hero film is like any other film, with an obligation and an opportunity to do better than simply make you sit there, waiting for it to end. The trick is to let the hero be himself. Spider-Man and the X-Men were adapted into excellent movies because the filmmakers understood the assets at their disposal. Spider-Man is a teenager trying to become a responsible man. The X-Men are outcasts, struggling to co-exist with humankind. By contrast, look at the film Ang Lee made of The Hulk. Even this great director got antsy accepting the nature of his subject, which is a big indestructible monster destroying his environment in a fit of rage. As a result, the movie was only half-good—thoroughly enjoyable when it allowed The Hulk to embody the freedom and burden of his supernatural gift, but such a drag with the psychological demons and the confronting and the yada yada yada. Save it for the cowboys, Ang.

Ghost Rider has an essential nature, too. He is a demonic stunt cyclist with a flaming skull for a head. All I wanted was to watch him tear around on his motorcycle, raising hell. Is that asking so much? Oh well, at least I saw the trailer for Spider-Man 3.

Copyright © 2007 by Theo Michelfeld