Monday, February 19, 2007

Bone Headed Movie

Just saw "Ghost Rider".

Wow.

Curiously, it's not Nic Cage who is going to drive you nuts. I think Nic Cage must have held both the director and the script in contempt and chose to just sort of do his own thing. And that's the only brilliance you'll see in "Ghost Rider".

After the movie spends somewhere near twenty minutes putting together the set-up, the rest of the action is just sorta obvious. Sorta. They pretty much say "Here's Ghost Rider, here's what he does. He has to keep X from happening." But this is also one of those movies where things were either lost in script versions, on the editing room floor, or because the director didn't know what he was doing. This is the same director as Daredevil, so who knows. Not me. There's just some action that seems to occur just to occur and not because it makes much sense. Like Wes Bentley's wardrobe.

It's not really clear why Satan's son is in a fight with daddy, or what his master plan is. Or why he...

Oh, heck. At least the movie moves along really, really fast. And Eva Mendes is very good looking, even if she has the least believable presence as a news reporter in recent memory. But, again, she's very good looking, and so we can forgive her.

Sam Elliot plays the old Ghost Rider, who actually DOES have precedent from the comics, if my West Coast Avengers memory serves.

I dunno. It's a dumb movie. But the FX are decent, Cage was funny, and Eva Mendes is, I repeat, very good looking.

I've not read a lot of Ghost Rider comics. Frankly, I thought the character was sort of one note. But that can work okay in a movie. It just doesn't sustain over an ongoing comic series.

2 comments:

Michael Corley said...

I liked it. I liked it because I have (I'm afraid) low expectations for my favorite genre of movies. And, as you say, Cage was just plain fun to watch.

My favorite plot wierdness was that he turns back to human on the first sunrise AT THE EXACT spot where the old ghost rider lives. Umm... why?

My second is that the old ghost rider is safe on "Hallowed Ground" and the bad guys can't go there. But they can go IN A CHURCH. I'm no theologian, but isn't a church a little more blessed than a graveyard?

Still... despite all of that, I enjoyed myself watching it, and that's what I want from a movie.

The League said...

As I mentioned, the movie had some big problems from multiple sript versions, a bad director or things left on the cutting room floor. The opening also tells us that every generation has a Ghost Rider, but we more or less learn that Sam Elliot and Johnny Blaze are the only two Ghost Riders, possibly ever.

Mark Steven Johnson or whatever his name is, is an absolutely abysmal director.