GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE D: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor. Opens February 17. 104 minutes. For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Nicolas Cage really wants to be a superhero. And from the evidence of Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance, he’ll do just about anything that lets him play one.
Here, Cage imports the story from last year’s Drive Angry into another 3-D actioner, with his accursed Johnny Blaze, now hiding out in eastern Europe, dragged into service to protect a boy (Fergus Riordan) and his mother (Violante Placido) who’ve landed at the centre of an apocalypse plot orchestrated by the devil (Ciarán Hinds, taking over from Peter Fonda).
Promised a chance to rid himself of his flaming alter ego by a helpful cleric (Idris Elba), Blaze signs on in hopes of doing some good with the raging demon he contains within. It’s basically a Hulk movie, if the Hulk rode a flaming motorcycle and, in one entirely gratuitous image, pissed hellfire.
The directors this time around are Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, whose films offer a more rambunctious, gleefully profane approach than the first film’s firmly square Mark Steven Johnson.
While pairing an actor as reliably outsized as Nicolas Freakin’ Cage with the guys who made the Crank films and Gamer must have seemed like a great idea, the chemistry’s all wrong. Cage’s mannered mania is an uneasy fit within Neveldine and Taylor’s frantic aesthetic they’re incompatible variants of crazy. (Also incompatible: Neveldine/Taylor’s trademark jangly visuals with the 3-D process. You will get a headache.)
Where the first Ghost Rider was a decidedly straitlaced affair, with Cage bouncing madly around inside it, Spirit Of Vengeance fails to capitalize on either its star or its concept. The effects are considerably improved this time around, with Cage “performing” the CG-skulled Ghost Rider without the dulling filter of motion-capture, but the character still does nothing but rage, smash stuff and disappear, meaning that every time he manifests, the movie gets a lot less interesting.
normw@nowtoronto.com
