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Ghost Rider (2007) - Hell, It Ain't Awful

 



Last year when my best friends came back from a trip during which I watched their dogs, they came baring a gift knowing I am a sucker for box sets and DVD compilations: a used DVD two-pack of Ghost Rider and Hellboy. I’ve seen Hellboy enough times in my life to know I’m a fan, but I barely remember anything about Ghost Rider so yesterday I got it into my head that it might be a fun review for my blog that is something other than a straight forward horror film (although obviously having a lot of horror elements) and since I got too tired last night I watched it at the most appropriate period of time of the middle of morning while I was killing time until an afternoon appointment.

As always, we start with the bad. The skull absolutely looks like it is out of PS2 game, how are you going to make a movie about a flaming skull dude and not just invest most of your budget into making sure the flaming skull looks good? On that note, most of the CGI also looks pretty bad even by 2007 standards and despite the fact most of it disguises itself by the nature of most action taking place at night. While I’ve seen solid performances before by both, Eva Mendes and especially Wes Bentley give pretty bad performances, with Eva just broad and inch deep and Wes trying his best to give menacing villain vibes but just coming off as wooden and a little unintentionally funny. The film never quite figures out what tone it is aiming for, and sometimes you can get whiplash from it playing itself broadly for laughs vs. demonic action sequences and gothic atmosphere. The dialog is often beyond corny, and any part of the script focused romantic motivations is pretty cringeworthy.

It ain’t all bad though. The film absolutely has that comic book feel, which at the time of the Nolan Batman films and the like was really not seen as an attribute to a comic book adaptation where the trend was to get gritty and realistic with it but in subsequent years we’ve seen with the likes of Ang Lee’s Hulk and the Punisher: War Zone becoming cult classics among film nerds after years of MCU and DCEU bombardment, and frankly while this isn’t near as good as either I think it deserves some degree of reevaluation on those grounds. Like the editing is sometimes super dated to the mid 00s, but there’s comic-learned sense of color and atmosphere and a frequent kinetic energy that keeps things operating at a fast pace. It’s dumb, pulpy, but fun.

I really, really enjoy Nic Cage’s performance who plays Johnny Blaze as a sort of dopey, earnest Karen Carpenter-loving eccentric that really feels like its closer to the weirdo that Cage naturally is more than most roles he’s ever played. When he says he watches a lot of TV several times in the film like a catchphrase, I believe him. Sam Elliott unsurprisingly steals every bit of screentime he has, dude is just a total pro no matter which cowboy role you drop him into. Likewise, the sparingly used Peter Fonda absolutely could have chosen to chew a lot more scenery playing Mephisto but he uses surprising restraint and it makes you wish he was in the movie more often. Donal Logue is another great actor who lights up the screen but is disappeared from the action for too large a swath and it just leaves you wishing they’d utilized him more. It was pretty good cast that they didn’t always utilize as well as they could.

I went into this just remembering this movie as really bad, a punchline for Nic Cage’s tax trouble years as an actor taking any role offered to him, so I was genuinely surprised by the fact that I was never miserable or even really bored during it, and while by no circumstances would I call it a good movie or a lost classic, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting.

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