GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE: Trading One Demon for Another

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) – Directed by Neveldine/Taylor – Starring Nicolas Cage, Ciarán Hinds, Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Christopher Lambert, Idris Elba, and Anthony Head.

Odin help me, I kind of dig GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE.

Oh, yeah, large swaths of it are a mess, Nic Cage has hit a point where he’s often doing a self-parody of a self-parody and the film feels like nothing more than a fill-in issue of a regular Ghost Rider run with really pretty art and passable writing, and what it does more than anything is illustrate how much an Idris Elba-starring Black Panther film would rock, but there’s some real energy here that was completely lacking in the first GHOST RIDER film.

Much like Wrath of the Titans, it’s nice to see that a sequel has learned from the mistakes of the first film. I bring Wrath up because the first Sam Worthington-starring Clash of the Titans was a mixed bag of serious actors like Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes playing their roles like they were making a fun B-movie and younger actors like Worthington who were treating the material like it was the most somber story ever told. Wrath was able to bring both sides of that divide together and the result was a much more cohesive vision.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has learned the same lesson, and instead of a disjointed, confused origin story, we get a streamlined, straightforward action film. It’s fitting that the directing duo of Neveldine/Taylor has been brought in because VENGEANCE has more in common with their Crank series than it does with the original GHOST RIDER.

It’s important that superhero movies show diversity and as silly as it may be to say it, I really believe that the continued existence of superhero films needs movies like SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE every bit as much as it needs The Dark Knight. Nolan can stake his claim at the literary end by delving into deep philosophical discussions, but a film like VENGEANCE just wants to entertain the heck out of you for 95 minutes and for the most part, I think it succeeds.

A very non-traditional French priest named Moreau (Idris Elba) is trying to protect Nadya (Violante Placido) and her son Danny (Fergus Riordan) from some thugs with guns who’ve been hired by Roarke (Ciaran Hinds), who’s actually the devil, to bring her in because it’s his kid and he wants to put his soul in the kid’s body because it’s more powerful than his. This opening sequence takes place in a monastery and there’s monks (including Anthony Head) and guns and Idris Elba and it sets the tone for what follows – this is going to be a good looking, (relatively) low budget action movie.

When Nadya and Danny escape the thugs and Moreau escapes death, the priest goes to find Johnny Blaze (Cage) to offer him a deal – if Blaze brings Danny in, Moreau’s fellow priests will pull the demon out of Blaze and he can go back to having a normal life.

And, yeah, I hate stories like this. I’m sure being the Ghost Rider isn’t the coolest superhero identity to have (it prevents a relationship with Eva Mendes at the end of the first film, after all), but isn’t being the Ghost Rider a cooler gig than jumping cars at a carnival? Wouldn’t you rather be out seeing the world on the back of a flaming chopper than sharing your front lawn with a a Snow Cone machine?) At least we’re dealing with a real demon here, so I can understand Blaze wanting him out, and at least the story spends more time with Blaze trying to rescue the kid than it does with him whining about not wanting to be who he is.

Once Moreau and Blaze make this deal, the rest of the film is primarily a chase film followed by a raid film. It’s not great but I didn’t hit the pause button, and I didn’t spend time checking Twitter or answering text messages. I just laid on the couch and watched a decent action film starring a guy who turns into a flaming skeleton.

And that’s really where VENGEANCE succeeds for me – it has a vision and it’s consistently deployed from start to finish. Neveldine/Taylor don’t screw around and let Cage get all wacky, either. In the first film, it’s like Cage changed his approach to the character every day, but Neveldine/Taylor only let him have a few scenes where he’s all Crazy Nic Cage. For the most part, they get a consistent performance from their leading man, and when he gets to indulge his acting chops, it comes in a admittedly bizarre scene between him and Danny in a diner while they’re on the run.

The content of the scene isn’t bizarre. The content is solid – Danny is looking for a father figure and Johnny feels a need to fill that role – but they’re on the run from the agents of the devil and here they are munching on fries and having a surrogate family moment. They try to cover it by saying that Nadya is off getting gas, but there’s no urgency to what they’re doing. Johnny even says they have to keep moving, but he says it like you might say, “We need to get to the beach sometime this summer. Maybe. If we can find a day that’s not too hot. And I’m not feeling bloated that day.”

Johnny does deliver Danny to some weird monks with writing on their face led by Christopher Lambert and Moreau does keep his promise to get the demon out of him. I love that Danny is p*ssed at Johnny for going through with the exorcism (that they both have a piece of Hell inside them gave them something to bond over), and there’s a great payoff later when Danny spits hellfire into Johnny to return the Spirit of Vengeance back into him.

This isn’t the greatest CGI work ever laid into a film, but it’s hard to make Ghost Rider look lame. They try – there’s a new transformation process that allows Cage to make weird faces – but for the most part, the Rider looks bad ass and if you’re actively choosing to watch a Ghost Rider film, you want that. The film also uses some comic book-inspired vignettes to explain things and they mostly work. They’re a bit of different and again, I’m big on superhero films not all looking and acting alike, so I applaud the effort.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE had a very modest budget of $57 million and you can see where they’ve cut some financial corners but it doesn’t prevent this movie from being a satisfying ride. (Get it? Gene Shalit would be so proud.) It’s world’s better than the first GHOST RIDER film, and even if it does feel a bit like a fill-in issue, it delivers. At the end of the film, the demon inside Johnny has reverted back to its original angelic form, and we get a blue-flamed Ghost Rider replacing the red-flamed version, which allows the movie to end on an up note – Blaze hasn’t disconnected himself from the demon, but he has made peace with it.

Sooner rather than later, SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE is going to find it’s way to the bargain bin, and when it does, I’ll be picking up a copy. It’s a slick, stylistic action movie starring a dude with a flaming skull.

Works for me.

GHOST RIDER: Your Chances Just Went From None to Slim

Ghost Rider (2007; Extended Cut) – Directed by Mark Steven Johnson – Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Wes Bentley, Sam Elliott, Donal Logue, Brett Cullen, and Peter Fonda.

Wow, GHOST RIDER is a piece of sh*t.

It shouldn’t be. Somehow, the filmmakers managed to get both Peter Fonda and Sam Elliott to show up and chew scenery and hoodwinked $110 million out of Columbia Pictures (or Sony). The visual effects are actually pretty decent and the idea is solid enough, it’s just …

It’s like this. Watching GHOST RIDER, I have the sense that everyone involved decided to make a relatively serious film peppered with a few moments of levity to keep the movie from being unrelentingly grim, but then the morning of the first day of shooting, Nic Cage rolled in after a three week Elvis-inspired bender of friend peanut butter and banana sandwiches and decided to do his own thing.

The elements of a decent movie exist here, but much like director Mark Steven Johnson’s other superhero film, Daredevil, the final product simply never comes together.

The big problem with GHOST RIDER is the two leads: Nic Cage and Eva Mendes. Cage is so unfocused here it’s like he’s playing a different character in nearly every scene. He’s clearly going for an Elvis vibe here, but in some scenes he lays on the Tennessee accent like slow-cooked barbecue sauce and in others it’s barely there. Cage has delivered some wretched performances in some wretched movies but I tend to agree more with Roger Ebert’s defense of his acting abilities than Sean Penn’s famous dismissal of Cage that, he’s “no longer an actor.” That said, Cage is awful here. In his defense of his acting, Ebert says that Cage “always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him.”

That is not the performance Cage gives in GHOST RIDER. In an unintended bit of meta-ness, Roxanne (Eva Mendes) even calls him on his inconsistency. After she visits his apartment and kisses Johnny Blaze, he cuts it short. She wants to know what his deal is – he pulls a crazy traffic stunt to get her to agree to dinner, then doesn’t show for it. He keeps romantic pictures of her from their time as teenagers, but then he pushes her away. Adamant that she wants an answer, Blaze gives her the truth – he’s the Devil’s Bounty Hunter.

And, of course, Roxanne doesn’t believe it.

Why should she? Cage and Johnson’s conception of Johnny Blaze is all over the place. Grimly serious one scene, goofy the next … the film really does give off a vibe that Cage was making this whole performance up as he went along.

Mendes is no better. Her performance is simply awful and the part she’s asked to play is insipid. When she gets drunk at dinner because Johnny never shows up, she asks the waiter, “Do you think I’m pretty?” and he shrugs as if to say, “Not really.” On the one hand, it’s Eva Mendes, but the waiter has been dealing with her all night and has clearly decided, “Not worth it.” Her character suffers from the same inconsistency as Blaze, but it’s made all the worse because she’s a professional reporter who acts like she’s still a silly 14-year old girl.

That’s why this film is so disappointing. When it concentrates on the Old West Ghost Rider, Carter Slade and his contemporary persona, the Caretaker (Sam Elliott), I kinda dig this film, but every time Cage or Mendes comes on screen the whole production suffers.

Watching the film here in 2012 I was honestly surprised that the film was released in 2007 because it feels like a much earlier superhero film. In my head, GHOST RIDER was a contemporary of Blade (1998), X-Men (2000), and Spider-Man (2002), not X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). There’s a lack of comfort with superhero films here, as Johnson feels the need to step
-by-step us through the narrative. We get a long scene depicting a young Johnny Blaze signing his contract with Mephisto (Fonda), then a long scene introducing the adult Blaze, then a long scene re-establishing the Blaze/Roxanne relationship and before you know it (I’m kidding – you’ll likely feel every single second of it), 45 minutes have gone before we get to Ghost Rider showing up in his own film.

RIDER is the kind of film that gives you a flashback to a scene that happened 15 minutes ago, and when films do that, you can pretty much guarantee they’re doing it because they think their audience is stupid.

Not wanting to use Mephisto as the main antagonist, the film brings in Blackheart (Wes Bentley) and some fallen angels, and very little of any of this works.

Unlike Catwoman, which is a complete disaster from start-to-finish, GHOST RIDER has some good moments, but all these moments really do is to reinforce how bad the rest of the film is in contrast. I like Sam Elliott and Peter Fonda well enough, and I honestly would have preferred to see GHOST RIDER done as a Western instead of a contemporary superhero piece. As it is, this film just does not work for me.

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Why?

Season of the Witch (2011) – Directed by Dominic Sena – Starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy, Stephen Campbell Moore, Robert Sheehan, Ulrich Thomsen, Stephen Graham, and Christopher Lee.

SEASON OF THE WITCH is the kind of movie that’s neither awful enough to just stop watching, nor good enough to ever be average. It’s not engaging, it’s not scary, and it’s not fun. What it is, unfortunately, is a dreadfully depressing movie, in part because the story is told in such a lifeless way and in part because Nic Cage and his character, Behman of Bleibruck, spend the entire film with such a vacant look on their face that you half-hope the only reason Cage took this job was because he needed another shot of smack and they were holding it off-camera and wouldn’t give it to him until he got through the scene.

Cage can be an infuriating actor, but I personally like the fact that he takes all different kinds of roles in all kinds of different movies. I don’t like all of them, of course, but at times his presence can help what should be a really awful movie become something fun, such as the highly enjoyable Drive Angry. In SEASON OF THE WITCH, however, he walks lifelessly through the story, which is maybe exactly what his character needs, but in that case, they should have found a different character for the lead of the film to play.

Let’s cover the one really positive part of this film right up front: Ron Perlman. Unlike Cage’s traumatized Behman of Bleibruck (they keep saying, “of Bleibruck” like it’s supposed to mean something, but since it’s the only character in the film they ever say this about, it just comes off as self-involved and arbitrary), Perlman’s Felson hits all the right notes. Felson is an old, grizzled veteran of the Crusades, the kind of guy who’s not fighting because he believes in winning glory for God but because he was a sinner and signing up was a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Felson and Perlman have that been-there-done-that-still-love-it vibe. Nothing seems to bother him or throw him, and he’s perfectly happy being Behman’s sidekick. When they’re on the Crusades, he fights and kills, and when Behman accidentally kills a woman and deserts, Felson follows along like a loyal dog.

It’s not just Felson that deserves credit for this film’s one, shining light, but Perlman, who’s the only person associated with this film that can get Cage to show any signs of life. Perlman’s professionalism and total commitment to this character brings Cage’s acting to the surface. Cage really does look like he’s having a dreadful time making this movie, with the scenes he shares with Perlman being a lone bright spot.

As for the non-Perlan parts of WITCH, it’s a film that makes you wonder why it even got made. The protagonist of the film walks around mostly depressed and guilt-ridden, most of scenes either take place at night or are soaked in a depressing grey color palette, none of the ideas are actually scary, and there’s not much fun. It honestly feels like a movie that should have been made with C-list actors on the cheap for a straight-to-video or -cable release and then somehow got a star to sign on so they figured, what the heck, let’s try and make an actual movie out of it.

Dominic Sena directs the film and he’s a talented director who makes soulless films. His four most recent films (WITCH, Whiteout, Swordfish, and Gone in 60 Seconds) all look slick but offer little beneath the surface. Gone is his best film, but now I wonder if it’s because it had such a star-studded cast (Cage, Angelina Jolie, Robert Duvall, Giovanni Ribisi, Delroy Lindo, Timothy Olyphant, Will Patton, Chi McBride, Christopher Eccleston, Frances Fisher, and Arye Gross) that the actors carried the story through the sheer force of their personalities while Sena did a credible job making it look cool. WITCH certainly looks slick but it’s such a muted color palette and such an improperly paced story that you can’t appreciate the slickness of it.

The plot concerns Behman and Felson get coerced by the Church into taking a witch to a monastery so the monks there can end the Black Death, and a couple others join them on the way, but this “rag tag group of adventurers” never really comes together or even interacts with one another in a meaningful way. There’s three clear Acts in WITCH – the pre-adventure where Behman and Felson fight and then leave the Crusades, the trip transporting the witch to the monastery after they’ve been forced to come back into the church’s employ, and the big fight at the monastery with the supernatural throwdown with the demon who’s been hiding inside the witch-who-isn’t-a-witch-after-all.

The first Act is pointless because it adds nothing to the film. We could very easily have junked the entire first bit with Behman and Felson cutting down enemies over several years in the Crusades because it adds nothing to the film. The bad guy of this act is a church representative who keeps giving big speeches about how everyone they fight needs to die because God wants it that way. Since this dude never shows up again, we could have done without all that screen time establishing him as the bad guy.

In the second Act, Behman and Felson transport the witch. Up to now there hasn’t been any supernatural bent to the film and the Church has been clearly signaled as being the bad guys, so when the witch shows up as the explanation for the plague, I’m thinking this is going to be revealed as more Church nonsense. Except she really is a witch – or, at least, extremely powerful for what her human body should be able to do. It offers a wonderful opportunity for the filmmakers to complicate things, but they don’t. Instead, we’ve got a seemingly unending journey (though it only takes about 30 minutes of screen time) through dark woods. The most tense part of the film is the group trying to get across a rotted bridge.

In the third act, they reach the monastery, find all the monks dead (except one, that is, who promptly dies), and then the witch is revealed as a girl possessed by a demon. It’s a nice twist, and the twist that the demon has wanted to get to the monastery all along is a legitimately good one, but that’s all the cleverness the film can muster. What happens next is a battle in a cramped room with poor lighting. Think of the lamest fight scene in any Harry Potter movie and then imagine what it would look like if the people filming that scene had turned off the lighting and you’ve got an idea of this final sequence.

At the end of the day, SEASON OF THE WITCH apparently made money (the Never Wrong says it cost $40 mil and made $90 mil worldwide), so it did what it was made to do, but it’s such a joyless, dreary experience that I’m left to wonder why it was even made.