Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Is Dumb, Fun
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
As impressive as Nicolas Cage’s career is, it would be even more auspicious if he’d made different choices or timing had worked out better. Cage came VERY close to starring in the 1980s cult classic Miracle Mile and very nearly starred in The Wrestler as well.
If Cage had been easier to reach there is a VERY good chance that he would have re-teamed with Face/Off costar John Travolta as part of the massive ensemble for Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.
Even more excitingly, and frustratingly, Cage had a chance to work with a filmmaking team WAY more talented than that Malick creep when he almost starred in Neveldine/Taylor’s Crank.
Jason Statham was terrific in Crank and brought a sexy Frankenstein brute physicality to the role that Cage would have lacked but the Academy Award winner would have more than made up for it with crazy energy and wildcard charisma.
Can you even imagine how unbelievably awesome Crank would have been with Nicolas fucking Cage in the lead role? It boggles the mind. That movie is already perfect. With Cage in the lead role it would have been even MORE perfect.
At the risk of hyperbole, if Cage had starred in Crank it would be the best movie of all time, or at least the most awesome.
Oh, and Cage was also apparently the second choice to play Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon and famously came very close to playing Superman for Tim Burton but the important thing to remember is that Nicolas Cage almost starred in Crank, and by extension Crank 2.
I’ve heard of indigestion but this is ridiculous!
As a super-fan of the Martin Short/Charles Grodin movie Clifford, Cage knows great art when he sees it so even though he did not get to star in either of Neveldine/Taylor’s towering, timeless trash masterpieces he collaborated with them on the little-loved 2011 sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and Punisher: War Zone were the only two films released under the Marvel Knights banner. The idea was for Marvel Knights to put out dark, gritty, edgy hard-R comic book movies based on more adult characters with less experienced, rawer filmmakers.
Unfortunately the studio lost its nerve and decided that the dark, edgy, gritty Ghost Rider sequel that would give fans the tormented, violent anti-hero they craved would be PG-13 so ANYONE could see it! Even a little baby.
With PG-13 parental guidance is suggested but really if a three year old had money and bought a ticket to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance it would be able to see the movie.
Neveldine/Taylor had a vision for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance that was hopelessly compromised by a restrictive PG-13 rating, an inadequate budget, sub-par villains, a grey and visually uninteresting Eastern European setting and terrible CGI.
Other than that, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has a LOT going for it. Neveldine/Taylor’s primary innovation involves playing up the gothic horror elements and downplaying the campy silliness of the original.
Cage basically played Johnny Blaze as a Carpenters-loving, jelly bean-chomping daredevil goofball in the first film. Jelly beans and the Carpenters are insufficiently badass for this iteration, unfortunately,
In Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance our hero is no longer a supernatural Evel Knievel unhappily in league with the devil but rather a werewolf-like figure who turns into a flaming demonic motorcyclist when he gets angry.
Spirit of Vengeance is never more fun than when Johnny Blaze is on the verge of transforming into the Ghost Rider, when its spirit of vengeance is overtaking him and transforming him into something monstrous and wrong but also badass and awesome.
In the movie’s most transcendently silly moment, Cage describes that intense, exhilarating, uncontrollable feeling of knowing that he’s about to become the Ghost Rider as “Scraping at the door! Scraping at the door!”
When I saw Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance during its theatrical run I was disappointed that the new look Ghost Rider just looked like a cheesy charred computer skull. Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you must but I did not mind at all that Ghost Rider’s head looks cheesy as fuck this time around. In fact, I quite liked it.
Everything about Cage’s transformation into Ghost Rider is cheesy. I don’t have a problem with that now. I also appreciated that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance goes out of its way to be darker and more adult than its predecessor yet still finds time for Ghost Rider to piss fire.
In keeping with the horror movie vibe, Spirit of Vengeance’s plot is partially cribbed from The Omen and its many knock-offs.
Mephisto is back, baby, only this time he’s played by Ciarin Hinds. According to IMDB trivia, “Apparently, Peter Fonda was offered to come back in this film but after reading the first 5 pages of the script he flat out refused.” That does not reflect well upon the little loved follow-up, particularly since Fonda was offered the villain role in a sequel to The Boondocks Saints and flat out accepted.
Mephisto wants to take over the body of his son Danny Ketch (Fergus Riordan) so it falls upon Johnny Blaze and the boy’s mother Nadya (Violante Placido), a hard-luck survivor who made a deal with the devil that didn’t pan out quite as she had hoped, to protect him.
Johnny Blaze, meanwhile, wants to be freed from his curse so he hooks up with a group of Monks that include Idris Elba’s wine-loving Moreau and Christopher Lambert’s Methodius.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was filmed in Romania to cut down on costs and also so that Cage could check in on the many castles he owns in the region. It’s a frustratingly generic setting that’s dark and grim in the least interesting possible way.
I had VERY low expectations for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. I dimly recalled it being a dreary, joyless slog so you can only imagine how mildly surprised I was to discover that while the movie is objectively pretty bad and has a slew of obvious flaws it’s also way better, or at least way more fun, than I remembered it being.
Then again, my expectations were so low that the film almost couldn’t help but exceed them so if you too are curious as to how this exceedingly unimportant motion picture has aged you might also be pleasantly surprised.
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