He Rides Again

Can someone have Film Appreciation for a movie they don't like very much? Ask Cody Hamman about Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

The comic book adaptation Ghost Rider spent a lot of time in development hell before it went into production for its 2007 release, and someone who was attached to the project for several of its years in hell but wasn’t involved with the finished film was screenwriter David S. Goyer, who has a lot of comic book movie credits to his name: the Blade trilogy, the Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel, etc. Goyer wrote multiple drafts of the Ghost Rider script before the project ended up in the hands of writer/director Mark Steven Johnson, and one that he wrote in 2001 has become widely available online.

The script wasn’t the ideal Ghost Rider story, and there were elements that I strongly disliked, but it showed promise as a Ghost Rider adventure. A rewrite could have turned it into something awesome. It took inspiration from the comic book era in which the supernatural hero spent some time wandering in the American West. That’s exactly what the possessed biker Johnny Blaze is doing in Goyer’s script – and while he’s out in the wild, he crosses paths with a Native American woman named Nomi and her young daughter, Rain, who are being tracked by a group of mercenaries led by Nomi’s ex-boyfriend, Billy-Ray Carrigan. It’s revealed that Rain was conceived when Nomi was on the edge of death and made a deal with a man called Starke – the devil or Mephisto under another name. Nomi was supposed to give the child to the devil, but refused. Blaze / Ghost Rider steps up to save the mother and child from the pursuers, and in the process faces off no just with mercenaries but also monstrous coyotes (called Jaw-Beasts), gargoyles, and with a demonic Carrigan, who gets turned into a “Spirit of Decay” and ends up looking like “a golem of dessicated flesh knitted together with straw and sodden burlap, pieces of insects, twine, and razor wire.  Button socket eyes. Jagged bone teeth.  Beetle-black chitin for fingers and nails.” Basically, a scarecrow that causes anything it touches to rot.

When Sony Pictures was looking to make a follow-up to their 2007 Ghost Rider movie, they turned back to Goyer’s 2001 script, and that made a lot of sense. Not only does Goyer have serious street cred in the comic book movie world, but his script also showed promise. Scott M. Gimple and Seth Hoffman were hired to do a rewrite of the script... and here’s where things started to go wrong. Goyer’s script could have been rewritten into something great, but this rewrite took the story in the opposite direction. The new Ghost Rider movie would have roughly half the budget of its predecessor, $57 million instead of 110 to 120 million, so Goyer’s script had to be reduced... and everything that was cool and interesting about it went along the way. Every good dialogue scene, gone. The Jaw-Beasts and gargoyles, gone. Carrigan still gets the power of decay, but he sucks.

Nicolas Cage reprises the role of Johnny Blaze / Ghost Rider in the film, even though it feels more like a reboot than a sequel. The first movie ended with him embracing his powers and declaring that he was going to become a hero. Whenever innocent blood was spilled, he’d be there to fight the forces of evil. He’s not doing that in this movie. He’s still fighting against his powers, hiding out in Europe – the setting of Goyer’s script shifting over to a different continent because Cage liked the idea of Ghost Rider riding through Europe, easily going from country to country. And Sony liked the idea of filming in Romania and Turkey, which is budget-friendly.

The ‘07 film had its issues, but Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance tried to address some of them. The first movie had an overly glossy look; directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor brought a darker, grittier style to the second one. The first movie had weak villains and underwhelming action where Ghost Rider defeated his enemies too quickly; the second one has plenty of action and more fighting. But it also takes away some of the things the first movie had going for it. That movie had provided a good foundation for a follow-up to build on, but Neveldine/Taylor and writers ignored that foundation. The mythology had been established, but they tinker with it and complicate it. Johnny Blaze was more likeable the first time around. The first movie had memorable supporting characters, played by the likes of Peter Fonda and Sam Elliott. This one doesn’t. Sure, Fonda and Elliott are tough to live up to, but the actors in Spirit of Vengeance weren’t helped by the poor script they were given to work with. This is a movie that can make you forget that Idris Elba and Christopher Lambert are in it.

Ghost Rider can be a difficult character for some writers to wrap their heads around. You see it in the comics from time to time, where a writer will get the chance to write for the character and they get it all wrong. Nobody working behind the scenes on Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance seemed to understand the character. We’re informed of their confusion right up front, where a narration by Blaze paints Ghost Rider as an all-out monster; a murderous being that sucks out people’s souls and punishes not just violent criminals, but anyone who has ever done anything wrong in their life. Even if that’s “a little white lie” or an “illegal download.” That’s not Ghost Rider. The Spirit of Vengeance doesn’t punish people for small offences. He doesn’t suck out souls. And he doesn’t kill people. He only kills demons. But Neveldine, Taylor, Gimple, and Hoffman weren’t interested in getting Ghost Rider right, they just wanted him to be a cool monster in a crazy movie with a dumb sense of humor.

This is the sort of comic book adaptation that thinks audiences will be happy just to hear the names of characters they’re familiar with from the comics, or to see someone who looks similar to a comic book character. It doesn’t matter if they got the character right, it just matters that they have the name or the appearance. That’s not how it works.

As in Goyer’s script, Blaze crosses paths with a single mother – Violante Placido as Nadya – who made a devil with the devil (Ciarán Hinds as Roarke instead of Peter Fonda as Mephisto) when she was on the edge of death. A child was conceived that Nadya was supposed to hand over to Roarke, but she went on the run instead. Now she’s being pursued by her ex-boyfriend, drug dealer / mercenary Ray Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth). But the child isn’t a daughter named Rain, it’s a 13-year-old boy named Danny Ketch (Fergus Riordan). Comic book fans will recognize the name Danny Ketch; that was the character who became Ghost Rider after Johnny Blaze. But this character shares nothing but a name with his comic book counterpart, so what does it matter?

Roarke inhabits human bodies while he’s walking the earth, but a human body can’t handle his power for long without burning itself up. By conceiving Danny with Nadya, he has created a child who is only part human, so his body could handle the power. So, at the dawn of a new winter in the child’s 13th year, Roarke intends to transfer his soul into Danny’s body.

Blaze is reluctant to help Nadya and Danny, and flat-out says “I don’t save people,” even though he had just dedicated his life to saving people at the end of the previous movie. But when alcoholic priest Moreau (Idris Elba) promises him that a religious organization headed up by a monk called Methodius (Christopher Lambert) will exorcise the Spirit of Vengeance from his body in exchange for him saving the child, Blaze agrees to do so. Action ensues, with Ghost Rider behaving in a way that he wouldn’t in the comics, and in between the action scenes we get some bad dialogue, like a ridiculously juvenile moment in which Danny asks Blaze what happens if he needs to pee while he’s Ghost Rider and Blaze responds that it’s like a flamethrower. Not content just to leave it at some bad dialogue, Neveldine and Taylor even drop in a shot of Ghost Rider pissing flames. Did we really need that? I started reading Ghost Rider comics when I was six, and even at that age I wasn’t juvenile enough to wonder what it would be like if Ghost Rider took a piss.

The standout action sequence involves Ghost Rider confronting the mercenaries in a quarry, where he takes control of a Bagger 288, a giant bucket-wheel excavator. He “hell-charges” this excavator, which wasn’t something that was common in the earlier days of the comics, but happens more often in the era of Robbie Reyes being a Ghost Rider – which makes sense, because Reyes was created after this movie was released.

The moments of action are all this movie has going for it. The scenes involving character work are weak. Anything that deals with the mythology is awful. We’re told that Blaze is inhabited by a being named Zarathos, which is comic-accurate but another case where this is just “comic book character in name only.” This Zarathon was an angel, the Spirit of Justice, who was tortured in Hell and driven crazy. That’s when he became the Spirit of Vengeance. To exorcise this spirit, Blaze has to admit a secret: he made the deal with Mephisto for selfish reasons. Never mind that the first movie established that he did it for the right reasons, that he did it out of love to save his father from terminal cancer. This script backtracks and says that Blaze’s father had accepted his fate and Johnny’s deal was selfish because he didn’t want to let his father go. Why? Why is this script so bad and contrary?

Another insult comes when Carrigan is killed, but Roarke resurrects him as a “Spirit of Decay.” This resurrected Carrigan is meant to be a take on the comic book character Blackout; he’s made to look just like him. But this isn’t Blackout. For one thing, Blackout can’t cause things he touches to rot, and for another, he was never a guy named Ray Carrigan. The comic book Blackout is a pseudo-vampire demon.

Having tossed out the foundation the first movie provided, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance sets up a foundation for a sequel itself – something that could have been promising, because this movie’s Ghost Rider doesn’t seem much like Ghost Rider until the very ending. But then the credits roll. The film did reasonably well at the box office, earning somewhere in the range of 132 to 149 million, but Sony didn’t pursue making another sequel and Nicolas Cage announced that he was done with the character anyway. So we ended up with two movies that fell short of their potential for very different reasons. 

Ghost Rider (2007) is a movie I can accept, despite some underwhelming parts. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, I find difficult to sit through because it’s so far off base – but, at the same time, I’m so much of a fan of the Ghost Rider character that I’m still glad we got two movies out of the concept, and I look forward to seeing better, more accurate Ghost Rider movies down the road.