Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Release Date: February 17, 2012

Watch Date: August 25, 2024

“Still struggling with his curse as the devil’s bounty hunter, Johnny Blaze is recruited by a secret sect of the church to save a young boy from the devil.”

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I don’t know what happened. Genuinely.

   I liked the first Ghost Rider, sure it was cheesy but in a fun, comic book way. Sam Elliot was in it. It was a little bit of a weird, over the top plot, but that’s kind of buoyed by the charm of Nicolas Cage. It’s the ideal guilty pleasure movie.

   This movie. I don’t know. From the first moments you know that you’re getting into something completely different. Blaze’s scene where he makes the deal? That’s completely rewritten. The devil? He has a name now. The Rider has a backstory of being an angel, not just a consequence of a deal. How the Rider works is different, he doesn’t burn souls, he sucks them out. Even the bike looks different. When you can get him on the bike, cause it turns out he morphs everything he rides on, including giant construction equipment.

   It kind of feels like a betrayal? A little bit. The original Ghost Rider shouldn’t have been as charming as it was, and I allowed myself to love it, to buy into it. And now it feels like I’ve been punished for doing that. Like they just decided to reboot the whole thing for no reason that I can see, and then they took all the campy charm and tried to be serious, and tried to be everything I hate in a super hero movie. And clearly, so did everyone else at the time, because there’s no Ghost Rider 3 – he wasn’t even mentioned in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’, and everyone was mentioned in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’.

   I think the best thing to do is to be smarter than me, don’t spend the money required to watch this movie, and then hope that it just goes away – and that no one gives Nic Cage another shot with the Rider.