When angry Johnny Blaze turns into the titular Ghost Rider, a leather clad flaming skeleton who thrives on extracting the souls of evil-doers. Long story short you probably wouldn’t like Johnny Blaze when he’s angry.
Then again if you have to sit through either the terrible original Ghost Rider or this slightly less mediocre sequel there’s a fair chance you wouldn’t like him anyway.
A few things are telling about Ghost Rider, everyone’s favourite over-actor Nicolas Cage is only in it for about half the mercifully short running time, and the reason behind some of that absence – occasional animated sequences highlighting backstory and origins – are the best couple of minutes in the entire film.
But no-one pays $20 for a two minute animated short and Nicolas Cage has obscure and unnecessary artifacts to overpay for, so we are ‘blessed’ with 88 minutes of drudgery to ‘top off’ those couple good moments.
The core of the dull tweenery follows Blaze after he is sought out by Moreau (Idris Elba) to find a boy held captive by the Devil – the catch being that it is the same Devil who owns Blaze’s soul.
Because Johnny Blaze and Nicolas Cage are in fact much alike, one cannot control an inhuman inner being that steals the soul of the evil, the other cannot control his instinct to say “Of course” to awful movies scripts, thereby stealing money from innocent movie-goers.
I’ll let you guess which is which.
So to justify whatever overly inflated paycheque Cage overacts like a mental patient long overdue for his medication while this dull mess muddles its way to the most obvious of conclusions. It’s the same film we’ve seen many times before, efficient to the merest degree and as unnecessary as hell.
In between moments of over-acting insanity Cage looks puffy and disinterested while Elba wonders why his agent dropped him in this steaming load and other actors ponder how much CGI it would take to salvage a decent finished product. The answer is more than they used.
Near the conclusion of the film a character has the audacity to ask “Did we win?”. The answer is no. None of us did.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. Look I want to be more scathing but the fact is that as a comic-book movie it is just your garden variety regular-bad. That won’t stop too many people from watching it though…
