Netflix Reviews: Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance

The picture above basically sums up the movie, but I'll go into further detail I suppose. So there was this movie back in 2007 called Ghost Rider. It starred Nic Cage and was directed by Mark Steven Johnson aka the guy who directed Daredevil. Oh joy. The movie was a product of the early attempts of Marvel to develop movies. And most of them sucked. Including Ghost Rider. Jump to 2012 when, for some reason, the sequel/ reboot comes out. I guess there was and alarming number of people protesting to get this sequel made. For this installment the Cage is back as the title character but filling the directing chair, or chairs I should say, is the team of  Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, known by most simply as Neveldine/ Taylor.

Before getting into the movie I must first give some background on the directors. Neveldine/ Taylor first came onto the film making scene in 2006 with the, in my opinion, fantastic action film Crank. This immediately established the teams crazy out-of-the-box-thinking style that would only get crazier with each new installment in their career. They followed up Crank with Crank 2: High Voltage and Gamer, both of which came out in 2009. Even though Crank 2 made back it's budget it wasn't as successful as Crank and Gamer was just an outright box office flop.

While both Crank 2 and Gamer had huge problems they also had moments in each which showed the genius behind Neveldine/ Taylor. One that comes to mind is the end fight of Gamer where Michael C. Hall does a choreographed dance number with his henchmen. It was so wrong and yet so right, and moments like that are what show that the directing duo can be brilliant. Unfortunately, those moments were far and in-between in those two films and it's pretty much the same for their take on Ghost Rider.

Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance stars Nicholas Cage, Idris Elba, Johnny Whitworth, Violante Placido, and Ciaran Hinds. The sort of reboot sequel follows Johnny Blaze, now hiding out in Eastern Europe because apparently he thinks he's The Hulk now, as he is called upon by monks to help stop The Devil from taking human form.

The plot is one that has been done before and doesn't really make a whole lot of sense considering that Blaze explains early on that The Devil is weaker in human form. The way he tries to do it is by using a little boy who is also his spawn. Apparently the script was originally written by David S. Goyer and was intended to be a crazy hard "R" rating but the studio wanted it to be PG-13 so they gave it to two other writers, Scott M. Gimple and Seth Hoffman, to tone it down. Then once Neveldine/ Taylor were hired they rewrote it a well. It's another obvious case of too many writers with to many different styles and ideas.

As far as the directing is concerned, there were plenty of awesome bad ass moments but unfortunately they were overshadowed by the excruciatingly dumb moments that have often plagued the directors' movies. I did however enjoy how they saw Ghost Rider as more of a creature than a human, and the moments with the character Blackout killing people was done very well and close to the source material.

The acting as a whole was about as good as your average B movie with the outlier being Idris Elba who is constantly sold no matter what movie he's in. And of course Nicholas Cage is as enjoyable as always and he even mentions bees at one point. Elba and Cage keep the movie at least a little enjoyable and they keep you at least a little interested to see how it all turns out, which is a good thing cause the last fight scene is pretty damn awesome.

All in all, the movie is a crazy mess with a few enjoyable parts peppered in and a good fight scene at the end. If I had to pick which was better, and I don't know why I would, I'd say this is the better Ghost Rider movie compared to the original but that's not that hard of an accomplishment. I'd only recommend this if you're a fan Nicholas Cage cause watching him act crazy is the only thing that would really get you through it.

FINAL GRADE: D+