GHOST RIDER. The Madness of King Nicolas
While the three titles mentioned above have nothing in common, the fourth has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Well, except for the chopper and the horse. Because in the Ghost Rider – after all, Ghost Rider is permanently stoned, so he has the right to feel stuffy – we have a hellishly fast motorcycle with a bunch of mechanical horsepower on board and a crazily agile horse, alive, in a cameo, well, also standing, or rather – it could become an interesting Native American name – running in flames. Because when it comes to fire, the creators of Ghost Rider spared no expense.
In 1997, the conquest of action cinema began with Nicolas Cage, known until then rather for dramatic roles (Wild at Heart, Birdy, Leaving Las Vegas). In addition to action flicks like Con Air and Face/Off, he also starred in The Rock, where in one scene he chased Sean Connery through San Francisco. He chased him using a motorcycle, among other things. The motorcycle was mounted on a tow truck, and Cage, gracefully maneuvering on it, pretended to both ride and talk on the phone at the same time. If someone didn’t notice the tow truck back then – because it really wasn’t visible – they should carefully observe the shot where the speeding motorcycle and Cage are filmed from below. The front wheel doesn’t turn at all, shamelessly standing still. Eleven years after that motorcycle ride, Nicolas Cage clearly missed dynamic action cinema and riding on a tow truck. The result of this longing is called Ghost Rider, and Nicolas Cage – for some reason – looks more like David Schwimmer than Nicolas Cage in it. But that’s not a particularly important problem at the moment, so let’s move on to the rest of the review, where the relentless and endless critique of the Ghost Rider awaits.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I haven’t read the comic original of Ghost Rider, and maybe it’s explained in the comic why the main character is at least weird, where he learned to fight and catch a helicopter with a long chain, since he devoted his whole life to motorcycle stunts and – let’s be honest – didn’t have time to learn fighting and handling a long chain. And I don’t care whether the comic explained it, because it’s the movie’s job to explain it. Period. And it doesn’t even bother me that Cage’s character is a guy with flaming hands and a flaming skull instead of a face – convention. It doesn’t bother me that Ghost Rider drives through a glass (vertical, of course) wall onto the roof of a building – stupidity. It doesn’t even bother me that Johnny Blaze / Ghost Rider constantly makes gestures with his right hand and index finger, as if he’s about to sing “Love me tender” – sacrilege.
What bothers me is that after the transformation into Ghost Rider, Cage’s character suddenly gains some strange abilities. Where from, why, how? Come on, seriously. It’s a bit like Cage leaving the stage, and a completely different character from a different fairy tale, from a different movie, steps in, having nothing to do with the motorcycle stuntman – well, maybe except for extreme motorcycle riding and the aforementioned “Love me tender” without “Love me tender.” When Jim Carrey transformed into the Mask in The Mask, the green maniac was a multiplied by 100, reinforced Stanley Ipkiss. Exaggerated, unpredictable, but still with the character traits of the man hiding behind the mask. When night falls in Ghost Rider and the dark version of Johnny Blaze takes over, the character after the transformation has little in common with its owner. Let’s skip such an obvious matter as the fact that Ghost Rider doesn’t look like Cage and doesn’t have his facial expressions. Because it can’t, after all, Ghost Rider is just a talking, digital skull surrounded by even more digital flames. Animated in a way that resembles the intro to an average computer game, and that’s a big flaw for a character who wreaks havoc on the screen for quite a long time.
Cage, on the other hand, is somewhat better, though not much. Carrying the experience of split personality, brought from the set of Face/Off, he moves around quite smoothly, making strange faces like: “There’s something evil in me, get it out!”. So Cage is trying. He tries to give his character some character, color, tone, some feature. But the only feature is the one from the knife on his back, after Ghost Rider’s nightly action. Jokes aside. Johnny Blaze is, in principle, a tragic hero, a lost man who fights for a second chance after making a fatal mistake in his youth. He’s a loner who jumps on a motorcycle through 6 Black Hawk helicopters in the morning (jeez, what a scene… not very exciting and tragically exaggerated), eats jelly from a glass at noon, and watches a monkey doing karate on TV in the evening, laughing as if he had just heard the funniest joke in the world and was about to die from it. Johnny Blaze is strange, Ghost Rider is strange, and Cage is strange in this movie. I can’t help it. But the strangest are the villains: hell guys, devoid of even a shadow of charisma and class. The villains are so genderless that… let’s call them gray characters, because there’s definitely a lack of acting and screenplay colorant in black. So the gray characters kill everything that runs and doesn’t run up a tree, jump out of nowhere with a sinister “Boo!” on their lips, and can’t scare anyone for the life of them.
The plot of Ghost Rider is a mishmash of comic book clichés. The hero meets the girl, the hero experiences a tragedy, the hero leaves, leaving the woman behind, after some time they meet again. Eventually, the – in this case – gray character arrives, the hero discovers his superpowers, the gray character discovers the hero’s weak point (the woman – what a novelty!), kidnaps her, and gets his ass kicked in the end, because the positive hero doesn’t succeed in having the love of his life kidnapped. The only woman a positive hero can have kidnapped is his mother-in-law. But superheroes don’t have wives – and consequently, mothers-in-law – because at the moment she’s kidnapped, the movie would end. Getting back to the point, that is, the plot, the screenwriters should be praised for the innovative “saving the world” thread, so absent so far in any movie, and the “great” idea of sending Ghost Rider… to the swamps. The scenery is just like in The Empire Strikes Back. I was just waiting for Yoda to jump on Ghost Rider and deal with the fire. Because what else can you do in the swamps?
Paradoxically, I don’t regret going to the movies! I got a large dose of excitement, great editing, amazing sound and visual effects, and an unforgettable atmosphere of danger and powerful, spectacular destruction. And all this within a few seconds – in the Transformers trailer before the Ghost Rider movie.
Rafał Donica