Ghost Rider (Movie)

And I had such high hopes for it. After the start of a good new monthly series (which is now dwindling already) and after buying the Road to Damnation mini for myself to enjoy I had high hopes for this movie. Of course it’s nigh impossible for a comic to become a movie without it failing. Boy did this one fail.

Obviously this movie wasn’t the worst thing ever; however, I’ll start with some highlights. Ghost Rider looks pretty damn good, especially after getting his real jacket in the jail scene; he reminds me of Spawn, which I’m overly fond of currently. The plot had an interesting basis. Besides the normal “You sold your soul” cliché, it adds a new demon trying to rise to power, along with his three elemental buddies; they search for an item of great dark magic. Of course, the movie ends up blundering and ruins the potential of these two aspects of the film as well. I can't even go one paragraph without mentioning something negative.

First some clarification; Ghost Rider looks good when he doesn’t move. Once he starts his awkward gait, or talking in that god awful voice it ruins the character for me. He moves like a guy shoved into a C3PO costume. I know its leather, but it forms to you, and he never takes it off, he’d be used to it by halfway through the movie. For some reason they threw away Nicholas Cage’s voice for Ghost Rider, it’s some strange noise that reminds me of gargling babies on fire. What the hell happened? Cage’s voice would have been fine if they deepened it slightly, or if they distorted it slightly. In the form that it was presented in you can’t even tell if it is Cage’s voice they use as the basis for it.

Aside from the disappointment of the main attraction, Ghost Rider himself there lays an even bigger dilemma, the fights scenes. Just as a forewarning, I’ll be revealing a lot of the meat of the film in the next paragraph or so, though it may be better to just read about it anyway. The fighting in this movie sucked so damn much. There’s no nice way to put it. It had a lot of potential to have some cool brawl scenes between Ghost Rider and the elementals. How badass is that? Vengeance fighting through the essence of the elements? Do they pull this off? No, of course not; as I said earlier, the plot is about a young demon trying to rise to power with the help of his three elemental buddies. There’s Earth, Wind and Water. Ghost Rider fights and kills them in this order.

When he fights earth he wraps his chains around him, and the earth guy explodes. Yeah, that’s it. He just goes “poof” and it replaced with a small pile of gravel. A side note, Ghost Rider takes the chains from a factory in the movie instead of just having them thanks to his newly acquired ability courtesy of hell. Next up, the wind guy; oh no, he’s made of air, how can chains hurt him? Oh yeah, make a tornado by twirling them about really quickly until he just explodes for no good reason. That makes plenty of bloody sense. All that’s left is Mr. Water. So he traverses through a swamp to his last battleground, he could’ve gone around, but no. He’s dumb and goes kind of literally straight through the last elemental guy. So he’s pulled under. They just circle around each other underwater for a bit and then! Ghost Rider bursts into his flaming skull self and burns the water guy. Yep. He burns water. I’m still not entirely sure what the hell happened there. After all that he confronts the main baddie of the film, so the evil guy succeeds in his nefarious plot to devour one hundred souls. So now he’s super powerful, what is Ghost Rider to do? Oh yeah, his epic finishing move is a fucking stare. He stares into his victims eyes and kills him by making him feel the pain and sorrow of all of those souls. Snarky-ness aside, that's a really cool power and it would suck to die that way.

So basically the Ghost Rider movie was a bundle of great potential that Marvel just didn’t give enough funds to do anything extraordinary with. Or maybe not enough will power? Not sure. I wasn’t even asking for extraordinary, just a fun action flick would have been fine. Hell, I would have liked an animated version of Road to Damnation more than this pile of disappointment. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve seen, but it might just be the worst super hero movie I’ve seen.

P.S. I think very lowly of this movie…