Film Reviews

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Ciarán Hinds
• Details: US/95mins 12A

More of a reboot than a sequel, that doesn't help this comic adaptation achieve anything resembling coherence. Cage obviously wanted to do something edgier than the (financially successful) Mark Johnson directed original. While he achieves that at points, at others it plays like a heightened form of satire no one has bothered to tell the actors about. The first half is atrocious; tonally, performance wise and in most other ways it possibly could be. But as the film moves towards a conclusion, things somehow begin to resemble fun. Granted, that me be a case of progressively lowered expectations.
There's this kid, y'see, and said kid is in fact the son of aul Satan himself (the always reliable Hinds). Satan and our hero Johnny Blaze know each other from waaaay back, when Blaze sold his soul to him to save his father's life - in return having his skull burst into flames occasionally as he sucks souls out of other people. When the devil decides he wants his son back, he hires some dastardly sorts to do it - who our hero must protect the little Damien from. There's also something in there involving Christopher Lambert and Idris Elba being monks.
Cage is kind of an easy target nowadays. With the odd exception he has made consistently bad movies over a decade, and it's hard to defend him anymore. But Ghost Rider is a character he really cares about and hiring the guys who did Crank was seemingly a statement of intent. This was going to be dark, and it was going to be f**king mental. While it embraces elements of the latter, and occasionally plays up to Cage's whacky persona amusingly, Vengeance is crazy enough to be absurd but not extreme enough to be entertainingly so. The Eastern European setting was also a strange choice. Whether they went there for budgetary reasons and just embraced it is unclear; but it doesn't suit the character and the film is full of recognisable actors struggling with the accent.
Hiring two directors known for their out there, violent productions and then restricting the film to a 12A was another astonishing choice. This doesn't even have the cartoonish violence to distract you from how embarrassing the dialogue exchanges are. Neveldine/Taylor do handle the effects quite well and one or two action sequences (including a car chase) are genuinely impressive - it's just a shame the whole film doesn't play like that.
The first Ghost Rider was better. Actually, much better. And that's saying something.

Review by Mike Sheridan