Friday, February 16, 2007

Flame Out   [Peter Suderman]

Last night I caught a preview screening of Ghost Rider, the new comic book movie starring Nicholas Cage as a vengeful biker with a flaming skull for a head. One thing you can say: perfect casting. No special effects needed!

The good news is: It’s really, really bad. The movie was directed by Mark Steven Johnson, the same guy who gave us the laughable Ben Affleck Daredevil, so there was really never much chance that it would be any good. My hope was that it might be bad enough to get some B-movie jollies and a few good laughs. In that respect—and in absolutely no other—it’s a complete success.

Johnson has totally outdone himself; Daredevil at least had a pulpy comic book charm. You couldn’t exactly enjoy it, but you could feel sorry for it. Ghost Rider, on the other hand, is spectacularly awful. It reaches awesome new heights of flaming-skull badness. If Daredevil was a sympathy date, Ghost Rider is a full-fledged disaster of epic proportions that can only be experienced as an extended exercise in unintentional hilarity.

You know it’s bad when the first scene after the prologue is a tender moment between two teenage lovers that might be more at home in third rate Dawson’s Creek ripoff. For those who may have forgotten, this is a movie about a guy with a flaming skull for a head who wears a spiked leather jacket, zooms around town on a gigantic flaming motorcycle made of bones, and is literally the Devil’s bounty hunter. Clearly the filmmakers aren’t aware of one of the most important rules in Hollywood: Movies about vigilante bikers with flaming skulls for heads do not need tender moments.

Not that the flaming skull parts are any better. You’d think a biker/Devil’s bounty hunter with a flaming skull would be able to do some pretty cool stuff, but his main power is—get this—he stares at people. And makes them sorry they did bad stuff. Presumably the first thing they think of is agreeing to appear in this movie.

Seriously. A stare? What kind of a hardcore super power is that? Couldn’t he have super flame strength or flame flight or flaming claws or a couple of flaming swords or a flaming machine gun arm or something, anything, cooler than a… stare? What’s next: Mean Man, with his punishing arsenal of disapproving looks?

On the good side, Peter Fonda shows up as Mephistopheles (no kidding), which really makes you wish they’d ditched Nicholas Cage and made Easy Ghost Rider—about an aging hippie biker whose brain was charred by the 60s—instead.

02/16 10:03 AMShare