JM Cozzoli

Zombos Says: Good

There are moments in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance when Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), as the demonic Ghost Rider, forces men to gaze into his big, dark, empty eye-sockets with his penance stare. The penance stare makes his victims experience all the suffering they’ve caused. During those long staring matches, I anticipated seeing pinpoints of red that would slowly grow to become like eyes, filling his dark skull-orbs with crimson light.  The pinpoints never come. Someone in production should have noticed how dull it can be looking at someone else looking into dark, empty, eye-sockets with little else happening. Other moment’s  in this second, more pyrotechnically intense, yet more oddball, franchise entry should also have received notice. Watching Ghost Rider’s magical chain, whipping around to char-broil assailants into glowing embers and ash, and his flaming touch consuming everything is more exhilarating than the first movie, but everything else is underdone.

Johnny Blaze isn’t doing well with his deal with the Devil. He’s sulking in Eastern Europe (which considerably cuts production costs).  A mysterious religious order needs his help to protect a boy the Devil (Ciaran Hinds) wants badly. The boy, Danny (Fergus Riordan) is the Devil’s son. In order to become supremely powerful on Earth, the Devil needs to take over his son’s body. Although Danny has the required “D” sound for being the Devil’s offspring, he’s not evil. Not yet. His mother’s (Violante Placido) deal with the Devil is going sour, too.

That’s it. You now know the whole story. Johnny Blaze reluctantly agrees to become the boy’s protector, but Ghost Rider provides the seering muscle. Weapons with escalating destructive power are employed by the underlings hired to kidnap the boy. The weapon-toting underlings are employed by suitably nasty Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth). He gets whumped in spite of all the fire-power, but Roarke (that’s the Devil’s human name), brings him back to life, adding the power to decay everything he touches. With Johnny Blaze turning everything to smoking charcoal and Carragan turning everything to rot, the computerized special effects team earns its pay. One funny bit has Carrigan unable to spoil a famous snack. It’s sweet and moist, and a zombie hunter in another movie has quite a hankering for it. Guess?

When the boy is safely sequestered with the tattooed monk, Methodius (Christopher Lambert), who lives in a cave, Blaze gets a new deal to become Ghost Riderless. But the tattooed monk is Christopher Lambert, so any genre fan worth his or her salt will already know how safe that situation is. A not so surprising reorganization of effort to stop a Satanic Mass and save the boy leads to a Mad Maxish road rage confrontation that flames out too soon.

Perhaps that’s because the four or so writers and two directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, don’t all go in the same direction. There’s a Ghost Rider hissy-piss that either will crack a smile for you or insult, brief tender moments that should have been felt more, and Cage’s crazed and damned Johnny Blaze needs a bigger plot to simmer and boil in. Every other character is two-dimensional in spite of the flat 3D embellishment. Animated, graphic novelish, backstories show strong visual flair (and provide a cheaper way to bring an audience up to speed), but their tone doesn’t jive with the rest of the movie.

Opportunity for another sequel is given, but it better run on a higher octane than this one or I’ll be using the penance stare myself.