#65: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012)

My name is Ed, and I am watching Nicolas Cage films then playing the lottery using numbers based on those films until I can find someone who can lift this awful curse. This time: Ghost Rider 2!

Expectations were low. It’s unfortunate that the second time Cage chose to make a sequel, it was the follow-up to one of the worst films he’s ever been in. But, there was some hope: the creative (loosely spooking) team behind the first film did not return, and directorial team Neveldine/Taylor stepped up to lead the sequel. They’d been wanting to work with Cage for a while: their most infamous work, Crank, was written with him in mind for the part that Jason Statham ended up with (Chev Chelios, a man who will die if he can’t keep up his adrenaline levels up — surely one of the greatest action movie premises of all time).

God damn it, I could have been watching Crank instead of the sodding Wicker Man remake.

The first thing Spirit of Vengeance does is to make the wise decision to completely ignore the first film. The origin story quickly related at the start is, in broad strokes, the same, but beyond that everything else has been ditched, including Cage’s spectacularly shit hairpiece. Sequel or not, is it any good?

Well, on a purely surface level, Neveldine/Taylor know how to make a viscerally entertaining movie. This is a somewhat tempered version of the non-stop chaotic roar of the Crank movies but the gist is the same: increasingly unhinged things happen at an increasingly frenetic pace. Cage is much more ‘man on the edge’ than in the first film, hurling himself around manically while fighting the literal demon inside him. It’s obvious stuff, but it’s definitely more engaging than the “eat Smarties and looked confused” turn we got last time.

I dunno whether they shot in Eastern Europe for tax breaks or whatever, but they made the most of it, with some stunning location work using everything from Gothic castles to villages carved into the side mountains. The supporting cast boasts Idris Elba doing a questionable French accent, Christopher Lambert from Highlander with all tattoos on his face, and Anthony Head from Buffy, very briefly, before getting stabbed up good.

Unfortunately, none of this is quite enough to save it. The story’s straightforward thrust (goodies must look after/rescue kid), is derailed by its baffling details. The Devil (Ciarán Hinds, largely bemused) has made a deal with a lady to have a baby with him and now The Devil wants to steal his own son’s body because that’s the plot of the film I guess? Oh no! Will the Ghost Rider (who it now turns out is an *angelic* skeleton on fire) be able to stop him by driving a motorbike really fast? Handwave handwave handwave something explodes!

The film’s most active bad guy (A.J. from Empire Records, fans of fondly remembered but not very good films!) is turned into a very cheap looking monster about halfway through (he ends up looking like one of the bad guys from Stargate: Atlantis, fans of pissing your entire life away watching nothing but garbage!) and the visual gimmick that he’s hard to fight because he’s magically surrounded by darkness is more confusing than anything else. Why does shooting the Ghost Rider with a rocket sometimes blow him up so much that he turns back into Nicolas Cage and has to go to hospital but sometimes doesn’t really affect him? Why anything?

I suspect that, on the page, there’s not a lot between the two Ghost Rider movies. Spirit of Vengeance is on another level in terms of the execution of any given shot, but in the end is still largely risible once all those shots are put together and called a film.

But you get to see the skeleton on fire doing a big fiery skeleton piss. Twice.

THE NUMBERS

3 — AJ from Empire Records complains that the Ghost Rider turned 3 of his guys into matchsticks. That’s a metaphor for ‘burning them to death’.

5 — The film opens with a man driving a motorbike with the number plate Nc5 753T. I thought maybe the NC was going to stand for Nicolas Cage but it turned out Idris Elba was riding it. At one point the numberplate is backwards because the lazy idiots flipped a shot of the Romanian castle Idris Elba drives into.

13 — The film plays with the idea that the Ghost Rider can demonically transform anything that he rides, notably including the Bagger 288, an excavating machine that was at one point the largest vehicle on earth, weighing 13,500 tons. I suspect they had storyboards for some of this movie before writing any of the plot.

14 — Mephistopheles or Roarke or whatever the hell they’re calling him instead of just The Devil in this one drives a car with the number plate RK 14 ADV

22 — In the ‘don’t worry if you missed the first film, it’s not even canon now’ explanatory narration, Cage explains that he once did a bare ass triple 360 back flip in front of 22,000 people.

50 — While leading Nic Cage to some sort of special magical monk room that will cure him of ‘being a Ghost Rider’ Idris Elba picks up and swigs from an old bottle of wine he claims is worth 50,000 Euros. Bloody Brexit!

THE RESULT

Two numbers! Free lucky dip! So Spirit of Vengeance really must be better than the first Ghost Rider. Thanks, Crank dudes.

It’s been nice being part of Team GB the last few weeks just because I buy lottery tickets. I consider all the Team GB athletes to be part of Team Winning The Lottery With Nicolas Cage, and hope they’ll contribute at least 10% of future sponsorship and advertising earnings to helping me with running costs, i.e. lager beer.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

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