Ghost Rider review by Rosie

Ghost Rider

These are the days that make my job difficult. In the time it took for me to watch the stunningly horrible Ghost Rider, I could have (a) cut my feet off with a hand saw and then raced to see if I could invent new, usable feet made from common household items before I passed out, (b) painted my teeth rainbow colors with thirty-year old, lead-based house paint and then sued Sherwin Williams for not specifically warning me not to use house paint as teeth paint, or (c) dipped my head in barbecue sauce and entered into a man vs. grizzly bear cage-fighting tournament, just to name a few things. Each of which would have been a clearly less regrettable use of my time. But what’s done is done, so let me just get this review out of the way and then be able to just put this whole, ugly incident behind me for good.

Ghost Rider stars Nicolas Cage as the fortuitously named Johnny Blaze – a professional motorcycle stunt driver who, at night, turns into a giant skeleton on fire that is bound to do the devil’s bidding but also fights crime for some reason. The story takes place alternately in some remote, desolate, deserted plains with no hint of civilization for as far as can be seen, a giant bustling metropolis with huge skyscrapers that he can drive up the sides of and, once, in a hastily thrown together marshland area, with no clear rhyme or reason as to why or how they have gone from one setting to another at any moment. Eva Mendes plays the beauty to cage’s beast as Roxanne Simpson, the love interest who learns to see past the fact that he is a gigantic, flaming skeleton on the outside and love him for the insufferably pretentious hack he is on the inside. Donal Logue plays some kind of manager or something and more than holds his own, in terms of terrible acting, in his torturous scenes with Cage. Sam Elliott must have been being blackmailed or raising money for charity or something to appear in this train wreck and until someone proves to me otherwise I’m just going to give him a temporary pass and pretend I didn’t notice him.

To Cage, I cannot be so kind. I don’t know what’s happened to this once at least respectable actor since the days of Raising Arizona, and even up to Leaving Las Vegas, but his recent track record leaves us with no other alternative but to believe that he has set his sights firmly on the goal of joining Rob Schneider, Chris Klein and Vin Diesel on the Mount Rushmore of the worst actors in modern history. If this is truly the case, then I can only tip my hat and say congratulations Mr. Cage, you’ve made it. You may finally rest now. Every line of dialogue Cage delivers in this film is just dripping with unapologetic overacting. It is only as the incongruously CGIed flaming demon that his character ever approaches a natural articulation of dialogue. And that thing mostly just grunts and snorts, but still. Cage’s idea of a character quirk in this movie is to play up Blaze’s habit of constantly staring at himself in mirrors, while posing and giving himself pep talks (which, coincidentally, is exactly how I always pictured Nicolas Cage spending his free time at home). Some may think I’m being harsh on Cage here, but only those who haven’t seen the movie. And if it is true, as unofficially noted on one of the funnier IMDB trivia pages I’ve come across in a while, that Cage actually wrote sections of the script as well – I can promise you he’s getting off with a light slap on the wrist here.

As for the rest of the cast, I don’t even really know what to say about their embarrassing participation in this insultingly inane suckfest except that everyone involved should have their SAG cards revoked and fed to goats. And while I’m handing out punishments, I would also propose that Columbia Pictures should also be federally subpoenaed and made to answer for how they can justify spending 110 million dollars to bring this travesty into existence rather than using that money for more socially beneficial programs like, say, training an army of monkeys to use blow guns and turning them loose in downtown Manhattan. The Motion Picture Association of America should be picketed to change the “NC-17” rating to mean “Nicolas Cage – On-screen for more than 17 seconds”. And Johnny Depp, Jon Voight and any other actors who were ever partially interested in or attached to this project and decided to back out should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom and have bridges named after them in every state.

Essentially, in case I haven’t made myself clear, this is the kind of movie that can make you hate movies. And yet rumors persist of production soon to begin on Ghost Rider 2. It just reminds me again of those prescient words once uttered by a pair of kooky, young kids in love. “The whole world’s coming to an end, Mal.” “I see angels, Mickey …”


1 out of 10 Jackasses
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