Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” is an absolute headache, and I’m not just talking about the sloppy 3D. What I am talking about is a furiously mediocre sequel-slash-reboot to a comic-book stinker from 2007 that saw Nicolas Cage wearing shiny biker gear and having his dodgy hairpiece set on fire along with the rest of his goofy face. Its newly released follow-up is a minor improvement, sure, but that still doesn’t stop the film from being so helplessly inept that it will make you feel like setting your own head on fire – heck, your head may very well just spontaneously combust from the unrelenting tedium of it all.

Last time, the main man behind the camera was Mark Steven Johnson, the director who also gave us second-rate superhero flick “Daredevil” in 2003. This time, there are two main men behind the camera: these are Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the dynamic duo who previously gave us nutty 2006 exploitation flick “Crank” and its even nuttier 2009 sequel, “Crank 2: High Voltage.” As expected, their madcap, B-movie style is out in full force here, intended to solve the overwhelming woodenness that plagued the first “Ghost Rider” five whole years ago; trouble is, the film’s script – written by Scott Gimple, Seth Hoffman and David S. Goyer – falls flat as a pancake and consequently spoils all the mischievous surrealism that Neveldine and Taylor have tried to infuse into the film. The end product is a bit of a train wreck – or a motorcycle accident, I suppose – that’s hopelessly disjointed, increasingly wearisome and, most shocking of all, quite a bit dull.

In “Spirit of Vengeance,” Hollywood’s Master of Madness, Mr Nic Cage, returns as former stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze, who years ago went all Faust and sold his soul to the Devil to save the life of his dying, cancer-ridden father. Ever since, Blaze has had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde act going on, regularly transforming into a flame-skulled, chain-wielding, leather-clad demonic bounty hunter who rides about in a fire-spitting Yamaha V-Max and hunts for sinners supposedly deserving of some unholy punishment, Old Testament style.

At the film’s beginning, Blaze is hiding out in Eastern Europe, attempting and struggling to keep the Rider at bay. That is, until warrior monk Moreau (Idris Elba with a dreadful French accent) locates Blaze and requests his help to stop the Devil (a heartily hammy Ciarán Hinds, taking over from the first movie’s Peter Fonda) from getting his hands on a thirteen-year-old boy who is apparently of biblical importance. In exchange, Blaze will be granted the one thing he’s been yearning for ever since he first morphed into a soul-devouring petrol head: freedom from his horrible curse.

And thus the Rider is unleashed, and what an insane creation he is. As played by Cage this time (played by a stuntman in the ’07 version), the Rider is a merciless lunatic who lassoes his victims with his red-hot chain whip and pulls so tight they crumble into burning piles of jet-black charcoal. He can also perform the Penance Stare (killing his victims by gazing long and hard into their defenceless eyeballs), turn mechanical devices he uses into fire-coated machines from Hell, survive ginormous explosions and, as happens in one scene, ride missiles that are launched at him at very, very close range.

Naturally, the scenes featuring the Rider are the most enjoyable parts of the film, but even they are clunky and illogical; take, for example, the Rider’s grand entrance: the Rider crashes the party of a bunch of thugs, slowly crawls off his bike, stands for a while, swaying about awkwardly, grabs one of the thugs, performs the Penance Stare on him for about 30 seconds (displayed much better in the previous film) as the other thugs just stand around and watch from a distance, and then goes back to yet again standing around for a while before finally attacking them; it’s like a clumsily designed fight level of a video game where the player keeps putting the controls down to go do something else – I can’t say I blame the player.

The film very clearly believes itself to be totally badass; grungy guitar riffs blare over the soundtrack as the Rider struts about, rides his bike, pisses fire and vomits lava; one can only wonder what it is that he shits – this film’s script, perhaps? I guess “Spirit of Vengeance” has every right to think of itself as totally badass; the elements are all there for the film to achieve this (the strutting, the riding, the pissing, the vomiting), but the trashy, jumbled script just doesn’t allow for these elements to ever click together in a fluid, coherent fashion, resulting in the film becoming a monotonous bore that struggles to even get its engine started – that’s something one certainly doesn’t want out of a film featuring a gurning Nicolas Cage shrieking into a man’s face, squealing about how the Rider is “scraping at the door” and how he is going to “eat” the man’s “stinking soul;” this is an Oscar-winning actor reading these lines, ladies and gentlemen.

Neveldine and Taylor apply their wildly anarchic filming style wherever applicable, catapulting their cameramen into the air and putting roller blades on their cameramen’s feet for them to chase speeding cars; I must say, the behind-the-scenes stuff I found on YouTube was much more fun than the film itself. The film is certainly creatively shot and uniquely so for the superhero genre. The special effects are also rather nifty; the CGI used to create the Rider here is at least a vast improvement over the Rider of ’07. From a purely visual standpoint, the film would be perfectly fine, had it not been for the utterly useless, thoroughly flat 3D and the drab middle-of-nowhere locations in which the film is primarily set; I don’t believe “flat and drab” is a glowing recommendation for a film that’s supposedly all about a glorious, explosive spectacle of hellfire and damnation, do you?

Could the character of the Ghost Rider ever work on-screen in the same way it apparently has in the Marvel line of comic books? Well, considering the fact that the character is little more than a walking tattoo, I very much doubt it could; this is a character who, by his very nature, has no soul in his chest and no meat on his bones – truly caring about him seems an impossible task, and one that Neveldine and Taylor have failed to resolve here. The end result is a film in which we are entirely unable to care about any of the characters or action set-pieces because the script is so utterly useless at dealing with character interaction and narrative coherency that we spend much of the film scratching our skulls in cock-eyed confusion over what the flaming hell is going on – all the wacky visuals and gurning Nicolas Cages in the world can’t save this unholy mess.

3/10