The Travolta/Cage Project Ghost Rider (2007)
Cool hair, bro.
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
When I learned that Nicolas Cage would be playing Ghost Rider, an Evel Knievel-inspired superhero who works as a bounty hunter for the devil, rides a motorcycle and has a flaming skull for a head I thought, “Holy fucking shit. There is no way that is NOT going to be awesome.”
Then I saw Ghost Rider and had to wearily concede that not only was the movie decidedly non-awesome: it actually kind of fucking sucked.
I vaguely remembered Ghost Rider being one of the biggest disappointments of Cage’s career, a seemingly can’t miss proposition that fell short of all but the most modest expectations.
But hope springs eternal and this project has changed me. I now get more out of each of Cage’s movies because I have invested so much in him and his career, the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Travolta/Cage Project.
With the innocent heart of a child who loves Nicolas Cage, motorcycles, flaming skulls, superheroes and cheesy entertainment derived from the tackiest recesses of 1970s pop culture, I went into Ghost Rider once again hoping against hope that the b-list Marvel movie would, in fact, kick ass.
I regret to inform you that while Ghost Rider continues to fucking suck Nicolas Cage’ performance as Johnny Blaze does, in fact, kick ass. Everything that Cage brings to the movie is fresh and fun and inspired. Everything around him is fucking deadly, with the exception of fun supporting turns from Sam Elliott and Donal Logue.
Cage obviously has a lot of fun ideas for the character and the film. The writer-director’s only idea, however, seems to be “let’s shoot my terrible script as written.”
Ghost Rider is consequently a very bad movie with a very entertaining lead performance that’s not quite enough to redeem an otherwise woebegone production. Yet Cage’s delightful star turn here does make it a fair amount of cheesy fun.
As with Wild at Heart, Cage’s big idea here was to play Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider as Elvis Presley. Now when I say that Cage plays Johnny Blaze as Elvis I don’t mean that his performance is inspired, on some level, by the King of Rock/his ex-wife’s dad. I’m not suggesting that Cage was channeling Elvis either.
No, I mean that Cage straight up decided to play Johnny Blaze as the Elvis Presley who was born on January 8th, 1935, died on August 16th, 1977 and thrilled the world with his libidinous dance moves and hits such as “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Viva Las Vegas.”
Granted, this isn’t quite AS pure an Elvis impersonation as Wild at Heart. If Wild at Heart was Cage dialing it up to 10 on the Elvisometer from the first frame to last, Ghost Rider finds Cage’s Elvis level veering anywhere from 7 to 9.
Playing one American icon as another wasn’t the most unexpected of directions for Cage, particularly given his affection for Elvis. But it does make for an appropriately iconic, larger than life performance.
The other choices for the character are similarly fun if not terribly surprising, like making Johnny a Carpenters super-fan and jelly bean fiend, particularly the high end beans produced by the good folks over at Jelly Belly.
But if Cage’s choices are delightful and inspired, those of writer-director Mark Steven Johnson are consistently dreadful. The choice of Johnson as a writer-director is itself perverse and counterintuitive, since his main qualification for bringing Ghost Rider to the big screen is being the writer-director of 2003’s Daredevil, a comic book movie seemingly no one liked, comic book fans least of all.
Johnson’s dreadful decisions begin with sadistically making us wait nearly fifteen minutes for Cage’s introduction as our hero.
Every moment Cage is not onscreen feels like a goddamn waste, beginning with a pointless prologue with Matt Long as a seventeen year old version of Johnny Blaze who sells his soul to Peter Fonda’s devil in exchange for curing his dad’s Cancer.
That’s right. In 2007 Peter Fonda lazily coasted on his Easy Rider legacy in a pair of disappointing flicks involving motorcycles and stars of the motion picture masterpiece Face/Off.
This, alas, turns out to be the one time in which Beezlebub engaged in trickery and deceit in order to defeat a professional associate. Dude’s dad dies anyone in a fiery crash, leaving him with a VERY negative impression of the Anti-Christ.
Of the two movies Fonda made with Face/Off stars in 2007, Ghost Rider is the clearly superior. That’s not saying much, as pretty much every movie is better than Wild Hogs for a wide variety of reasons, creative, moral and otherwise.
The devil, being a real dick as well as the Prince of Darkness, bides his time as Johnny Blaze becomes a flashy, stunt-riding superstar with a sinister secret and a dark debt he must NEVER stop repaying.
Eventually Johnny Blaze becomes Ghost Rider. As a bounty hunter for THE DEVIL with a MOTHERFUCKING FLAMING SKULL and a SICK-ASS MOTORCYCLE OF THE DAMNED, Ghost Rider should literally be the coolest, most bad-ass character in the history of film, easily besting such lame pretenders as Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.
Instead, the film’s conception of Ghost Rider is so lazy and disappointing from a visual standpoint that the moment they realized that that was the best they could do they should have shut down production immediately. The technology simply did not exist to do right by Ghost Rider when the film was made, but they went ahead with it all the same.
Because while Cage is a cornball joy as Johnny Blaze, Ghost Rider is a CGI abomination, a charmless black velvet, carnival midway cartoon CGI flaming skeleton man who never stops seeming egregiously, unconscionably wrong.
He’s cheesy, alright, but not in a fun way or a way that seemingly has anything to do with Cage’s game, goofy performance. There is a total disconnect between the man on the bike and the lame cartoon character with the noggin perpetually ablaze with deeply unsatisfying computer animation.
It speaks to Cage’s extraordinary charisma and talent that there was not a moment Ghost Rider was onscreen that I did not find myself wishing I was watching Cage act instead of A FLAMING MOTORCYCLE DEMON WHO WORKS FOR THE DEVIL.
It does not help that they put Cage’s very recognizable voice through so many “scary”, “dark” filters that it’s unrecognizable. It consequently feels like the silly goth flaming head dude is never actually Cage but rather a cheap, unimaginative computer recreation with little to none of the personality, likability and charm of the Oscar-winning Con Air icon.
Being disappointed, yet moderately entertained by Ghost Rider all over again I found myself wishing that it was directed by anyone other than Mark Steven Johnson, including David DeCouteau and Neal Breen.
What Ghost Rider desperately lacks is an auteur in the director’s seat or even a filmmaker with a vision beyond “superhero movies are for dumb babies so here’s some juvenile nonsense the very young might be able to stomach.”
Johnson’s vision for Ghost Rider is boring and bland, cheap camp for undiscriminating audiences with low expectations. The blandness is genuinely more upsetting than the badness. At least the badness has a certain energetic vulgarity. The blandest is unforgivable given the star and the character.
Yet Johnson directs like the hack screenwriter who gave the world not only Daredevil but also Simon Birch and the Michael Keaton Jack Frost.
I found myself wondering what a Nicolas Cage Ghost Rider would be like with a 1984 Walter Hill directing and real practical effects, a 1999 Quentin Tarantino or 1987 Katherine Bigelow. Better, undeniably!
Comic book super-fan Nicolas Cage doing Ghost Rider should have been a big deal. Instead it was the kind of shrugged-off afterthought where, when it came time for the villain, they apparently thought, “How about the plastic bag kid from American Beauty? I bet he’s very available!”
For what I imagine is a very modest fee, Wes Bentley consequently BECAME Spooky Guy or Goth Kid or whatever the the fuck his character’s name is. The movie clearly doesn’t care about any of this shit, so why should we?
For all of the legitimate gripes about the Marvelization of movies and pop culture, watching something like this makes me grateful not to be currently inhabiting an era where the prevailing sentiment among studios seemed to be that superhero movies were dumb and bad so there was no point putting anything beyond minimal effort into them.
So even though I was once again DEEPLY disappointed by Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, if not by Cage’s performance as Ghost Rider, I’m sure I’ll be blown away by the sequel. It’s by the Crank dudes, after all, and I can’t possibly see them disappointing me with a non-Crank related project.
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