I thought it was pretty cool to have Peter Fonda playing Mephisto. If they do a sequel, do you think they will try to get Dennis Hopper? (I suspect Jack Nicholson would be way out of their budget.)
An Australian band. They must’ve been influenced by some of the local culture when shooting the film.
I thought Ghost Rider was kinda mediocre. I saw every plot point coming a mile away. Also, the mythos seemed kinda thin and uninteresting compared with Hellboy, a far superior movie in every respect. That said, after that first draggy half hour, the plot did move right along.
I have no interest in seeing it again, not even on cable for free. There just wasn’t very much to it.
I pretty much hated it. I may be a Ghost Rider fan (seeing a copy of the 90s Ghost Rider first issue is what got me back into comics as a kid) but this movie was flat out bad.
There’s one credited screenwriter (also the director) and he’s either AWFUL at this or there’s a bunch of uncredited guys who all had different takes on the story.
There’s all these weird details and character bits that never mean anything or just go on unexplained. Why does Blaze ‘drink’ candy out of martini classes? Why are there two bits of Blaze wanting to watch/watching monkeys on tv? Weird little bits of business that don’t add to the character.
Is Ghost Rider separate from Blaze? Why does Ghost Rider make horrible jokes and say such weird things? I felt like the movie itself didn’t know a lot of what it was presenting. Everything seemed really half-ass or weak.
I didn’t understand what Blackheart’s plan was. Or why he had to kill all those bikers in that bar, did he have to do that to summon the other three demons? Were the demons in the bar? Why were the demons working for Blackheart? If Ghost Rider is Hell’s bounty hunter and these four demons were all loose on Earth already … why was Ghost Rider not called in to service into service until just now?
Why is Eva Mendes considered attractive…because wow… she’s not. Why was the devil threatened by Blackheart getting 1,000 evil souls? Shouldn’t that be not that big of a deal to the guy who gets ALL the evil souls in the world?
There’s just so many “WHYS” in the movie.
Add atrocious dialogue and Ghost Rider flipping the bird…you get a shitty movie.
Man, this movie sucked. I went into it with extremely low expectations, and the film still failed to meet them. Basically, all I was looking for was some good superhero beat-'em-up actions. Throw a couple cars at people. That sort of thing. Instead, what do we get? The exact same fight done three different ways: demon shows up and knocks Ghost Rider down, while his demon buddies watch from the sidelines. Ghost Rider gets back up, and burns demon to death. Sidelined demon buddies run away. Whee! The demons themselves were lame beyond belief. They looked like rejects from an Ann Rice novel, and the actor playing Blackheart looked like he got the role because John Stamos wanted too much money. The guy had all the demonic malevolence and sinister evil of Little Nicky. The villains are so ineffectual that the movie boils down to nothing more interesting than watching a Texas redneck kick the shit out of a quartet of goth kids. Sort of like high school, now that I think about it.
The plot was beyond dumb, too. First of all, if the devil needs to make himself a hatchet man, maybe he should stop asking good guys to work for him. You want someone to carry out your nefarious schemes without error or delay, here are a couple of the people you shouldn’t recruit:
[ul][li]Legendary Texan lawmen[/li][li]People willing to sell their souls to cure other people of cancer[/li][/ul]
Instead, try looking for thieves, murderers, rapists, wife-beaters, Satanists, telemarketers, and other villains. You know, people who are generally okay with the idea of committing acts of incalcuable evil.
Secondly, the devil wants to recover a contract for a thousand human souls. (We’ll ignore, for the moment, that the devil shamelessly plagiarized Stephen King’s Needful Things when he came up with the contract. He’s the physical embodiment of evil, you can’t really expect him to respect intellectual propery rights.) We are informed that these thousand souls contain so much evil power that it will make the devil powerful enough to rule the Earth. Wow! All that from a thousand souls! Apparently, at no other point in history has there been that many evil people at one time. Which makes me wonder if, for example, the SS wasn’t really as large an organization as history has led us to believe. Seriously, if the devil is so hard up for evil that a paltry thousand souls is supposed to mean something to him, the world of Ghost Rider must be a goddamned paradise to live in.
And then, the worst part of it all, when the movie’s over and The Demon Stamos returned to hell, the devil shows up and offers to give back Johnny Blaze’s soul! What the fucking fuck is that? The devil does not have a return policy! And if Cage refusing to give up his powers pissed him off so much, why didn’t he just kill him right there? It was broad daylight, so he couldn’t use his powers, plus he’d only just barely been able to beat the devil’s (presumably less powerful) son, and only then because he found a loophole in the whole, “I don’t have a soul,” thing. What was there stopping the devil from tearing his “favorite creation” into tiny little pieces right then and there?
There was a bunch of other stupid inconsistencies. The way Blaze kept telling himself, “You can’t live in fear,” usually while looking at himself in a mirror, like he’s Stuart fucking Smalley having a daily affirmation. You know, the idea that he’s trying to overcome a deepseated fear stemming from watching his father die in a terrible motorcycle wreck has merit, but it’s sort of undercut by spending the first thirty minutes of the film showing how the character has amassed a staggering fortune by jumping his motorcycle over football fields filled with Huey helicopters with their rotors running. If that’s his day job, I’d say we’re talking about a man who has already mastered his inner doubts.
Also, early on it’s explained that Blackheart can’t get the contract, because it’s buried in consecrated ground, and demons can’t enter consecrated ground. Which is great, except that ten minutes later, you see Blackheart playing with the lights in a fucking Cathedral.
The one good scene in the movie was the interview with the fat goth chick Ghost Rider saved from the mugger. That was hilarious. The rest of the film was awful.
We just got back from it and I thought it was a fairly fun flick. Pretty light hearted, with more than a little cheesy dialogue.
I like Nick Cage though, and it’s always fun listening to Sam Elliott growl his lines.
It was much better than the last Punisher movie, probably as good as the Hulk, not quite as good as the Fantastic Four.
Miller, I agree there were an awful lot of inconsistencies. I’d almost except a much longer director’s cut when the movie comes out on DVD or something. They could easily have explained a lot of things and maybe they did but it all got edited out.
My main reason for coming in here is this question: What’s up with Nicolas Cage’s chiseled rock-hard muscles and stuff? Was that CGI? He’s always been in reasonably good shape but it’s hard to believe he worked out long and hard enough to get that body for one shirtless scene. I was actually wondering the same thing about the upcoming 300 movie. Lots and lots of washboard abs but is it even real these days?