Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3D

Here's Pissing All Over You Dweebs

Any chance of a revival would take a certain number of years for this stinker to settle and be forgotten before a proper reboot can be conducted. And it's always a pity when you see some innovative names attached to this project being exposed for being suspected hacks, that they need their future projects to be ten times more successful to put this behind them.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, or collectively better known as Neveldine/Taylor who were responsible for the crazy yet fun Crank movies, took over the helm of Ghost Rider from Mark Steven Johnson, yet failed to meet that 2007 film standards in terms of storytelling. Granted they seemed to have a lot of fun with the material in setting up what they thought were interesting camera angles and shots, but ultimately their lack of respect for and familiarity of the source material is telling, with the way the character, and the story got treated. David S. Goyer, responsible for the story and screenplay with additional inputs by Scott M. Gimple and Seth Hoffman, seemed adamant to earn this film the title of being the stinker film of the year, and amongst the worst of the lot of comic book superhero films out there. Which is a real pity.

The story is nothing more than generic involving yet another demonic child that Ghost Rider is made a proposition to protect so that he can earn a reversal of his cursed fortune. That would be quite a challenge if not for all the villains here to be so weak, my grandmother could have pulverized them all with her handy brolly. Making the hero all too powerful and invincible, only demonstrated the filmmaker's intent to dabble with the loads of special effects in the film to see what's the best way to make throwaway characters disappear on screen in the quickest of time, and bearing this fetish for wanting Nicolas Cage to behave like Jim Carrey's poor cousin.

It's one thing making a bad film, but it's another when a bad film is made to humiliate the ticket paying audience. Branding it as part of the Marvel Knights imprint for more mature audiences turn out to be the biggest joke here for the very juvenile way everything for treated here, which comes as a surprised since 2012 is expected to be a watershed year for comic book films, only to have Ghost Rider piss on the parade like the moment that you see in the trailer (with a still reproduced here) that got repeated in the film proper. Twice. Some films are so bad that they're fun to watch, but this one is so bad it actually hurts and insults your intelligence. Do yourselves a favour and skip it.

You can read my review of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance at movieXclusive.com by clicking on the logo below.