Ghost Rider Every now and then there’s a movie that looks so bad that you know that it’s gotta be terrible, yet you’re compelled to check it out to see just how atrocious it can possibly be. Well, there are movies like that and then there are ones that are worse – like Ghost Rider. Apparently not content with simply trying to outdo The Punisher for the honor of “Worst Comic Adaptation Ever,” it also feels the need to vie for “Worst Movie Ever” status as well. I have a degree in journalism and even that didn't prepare me to write anything that will accurately give you a feeling for just how horrendous this movie really is. I like to think that I’ll suffer for my art but, even so, I could only take 45 minutes of this garbage before I had to call it quits. I truly could not say one positive thing about this abomination of a film if I tried. Uh… there’s… no, wait, there’s also… and the part where… nope, sorry – not a one. Nicolas Cage (World Trade Center) stars as Johnny Blaze and is unfortunately at his hammy, phone-it-in worst, which is the Cage that we’ve sadly come to expect in the past half decade or so. I’m not even going to bore you with a plot synopsis. Suffice it to say that Blaze strikes a deal with Satan to save his father’s life (which ends up backfiring – shocker!), indebting his soul to Beelzebub for all eternity. There’s also some other nonsense about someone played by Wes Bentley (American Beauty) escaping from Hell, but do you really care at this point? You shouldn’t. Peter Fonda (Ulee's Gold) was a curious choice as Satan to say the least (his sister must have been unavailable), and it becomes painfully obvious that the guy should have been arrested and charged with scenery chewing of the first degree. Look closely – on the Blu Ray version of the DVD you can actually see Fonda’s denture marks on the side of each shot that he’s in. I had to try my hardest to resist laughing uncontrollably as Satan made an entrance that caused all of the lights in the scene to explode, prompting Fonda to remark, “Far out,” in an obvious nod to his (now tarnished) role in 1969’s Easy Rider. Needless to say, I failed miserably in said attempt. The opening (way too long) flashback to the origin of the Ghost Rider character is another one of the 458,279 things that are wrong with this monstrosity of a movie. Director/screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson saddles the sequence with all of the cliched devices of a bargain-basement introduction, from the troubled kid who just wants to break out, to the father who has his own plans for his son. In it, we see Cage and Eva Mendes’s (Hitch) characters portrayed as childhood sweethearts who are separated by circumstance, only to be reunited years later when Mendes, as a television reporter, is tasked with interviewing the reclusive Blaze. See… the problem with this is that in the flashback they’re the same age yet in the present day, Cage looks like her dad. Continuity, guys – is it too much to ask of a movie with a $110 million budget? Seeing as Johnson specializes in either Z-list comic adaptations (Daredevil, Elektra) or sappy bullshit (Simon Birch, Jack Frost) I’m gonna answer an unqualified “yes” to that question. When it comes down to it, Ghost Rider simply represents everything that is wrong with the movie industry today. It’s insulting to the audience’s intelligence, yet it somehow makes $115 million at the box office while a challenging and unconventional masterpiece like Grindhouse struggles to scrape two nickels together. It’s the state of the business and – I hate to say it – but if this is the road that film is going to continue to travel down… you’re just gonna have to get by with music and television opinion on The Dirtywhirl because a man can only subject himself to a finite amount of this horseshit.
Dirty Rating: 10/100
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