![]() They’re like that piece of extra bun in the middle of the Big Mac, undisguised filler.Īs for Cage, his Johnny Blaze seems less tortured than a torturer, with the audience being the victim. The directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, previously made the hilariously hyperactive action comedy “Crank,” and I never thought I’d see a movie of theirs that needed to pick up the pace, but the long stretches without special effects seem to fill no purpose except to drag the running time across the 90-minute mark. ![]() Other attempts at laugh lines sound merely like the sarcasm of the middle schoolers at whom the movie is aimed: “I’m sorry, did that hurt?” “Sorry, Jackass, but I’m dead,” “What are plans for his son? Is he putting money away for college, what?” “So that happened,” Johnny Blaze says, after one of Duraflame Dude tantrums. The horror isn’t scary, the action isn’t rousing (the Devil’s bodyguards can be distracted by simply throwing a bottle of wine in the air and then shooting them) and the comedy is not only lame but also undercuts any sense of demonic danger. But his big scenes of mass corrosion merely add to the general sense of rust and decay about the production. Far too late in the story, Carrigan turns into a demon himself, a creep with the power to make everything he touches crumble to dust (nothing can survive his touch except a Twinkie, a gag that is the only funny one in the film). The paternity of the boy is unclear until Johnny figures it out for us, telling her, “You’re the Devil’s baby mama.” A mild and uninteresting villain working for the Devil, Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth) is also in pursuit, but he has no supernatural powers so it isn’t much of a fight when Ghost Rider shows up and shares his hellfire halitosis with Carrigan’s henchmen until their heads explode. The girl, the kid’s hottie Gypsy mom, is played by Violante Placido (see what I mean about budget cuts? They couldn’t even afford Eva Mendes again). In that case, he’ll be a regular guy again instead of a flaming hog-riding skeleton who gets to prowl the night breathing fire on bad guys, spitting machine-gun bullets and whipping the malevolent with his motorcycle chain of righteousness, but Johnny seems to think it’s a good deal so off he goes. But if Johnny can save the boy his curse will be lifted. His dull sidekick (Idris Elba, doing a dodgy French accent) informs him that a kid named Danny (Fergus Riordan) is being pursued by the Satanic Roarke (Ciaran Hinds), who tricked Johnny Blaze into becoming Ghost Rider. ![]() Tormented by his uncontrollable inner hothead, a sort of flame-broiled Incredible Hulk, Devil-cursed Johnny Blaze (Cage) flees to the Balkans for no particular reason. 2, I think I’d rather sit through “Season of the Witch” again. The only part of this movie anyone’s ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame, although if the next installment is going to treat us to what happens when the Rider has to go no. Its subtitle should have been Spirit of Downgrade, what with the budget trimmed back by 40 percent and its bleak, cheap-looking gray-brown locations in Eastern Europe, the place where movie careers go to die. The original “Ghost Rider” was at least a flaming mess but the followup is a cruddy bore, alternating static, talky scenes in which the characters explain the back story to each other (you won’t care) to perfunctory, abbreviated action scenes (you won’t thrill). Ordinarily I’d be into the idea of seeing Nicolas Cage’s face burn, but alas, “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” is not a documentary.
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