Contrary to popular belief, “good” trash can exist in the movie world, but it requires clever writing, a sense of self-awareness and near-flawless execution. “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” has none of those things. The result is a film that’s so boring and bland that the only difference between it and a SyFy original movie is its $75 million budget.
Picking up from where the first film left off, Nicolas Cage returns as Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle daredevil who made a deal with Satan and becomes a flaming, evil-hunting demon known as the Ghost Rider. Now in self-imposed exile in the bleakest part of Eastern Europe, he has a chance to lift his curse by saving a generically adorable little boy (Fergus Riordan) from the Devil.
Cage, who’s recently adopted a “quantity over quality” attitude to accepting roles, can be at his best when he’s unhinged, but he needs a tight script to keep his performance in check. Here, he’s not acting in the film, he’s being unleashed on it. As far as I can tell, no script even exists, and each scene of dialogue consists of a spastic Cage vomiting out a mix of random character names and absurd plot points.
Even the action scenes, the bread and butter of this sort of movie, are interchangeable. The Rider lazily sets a few disposable bad guys on fire before uttering a series of catchphrases so bad they might have been overheard on the playground after a fight between third-graders.
“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” is an atrocious film. It’s a mess of illogical and brainless scenes that comprise one of the most aggressively bad cinematic experiences in recent memory. One can only hope that after this, “Ghost Rider” rides right back to the hell it came from.
