“I will eat your stinking soul!”
Nicolas Cage is one of the “talents” of Hollywood that has pretty much over-ripened. He once was a man who made films that had an interest from fans rooted in the genuine joy of seeing someone attempt to transform into someone completely different. Nowadays though he’s changed with the times to have fans who prefer to watch a train hit into a wall repeatedly just to see everything good in this world go horribly wrong. Here he delivers for the most part on that trend of train-wrecks of a movie with a patented “Crazy Cage” performance that is worthy of sitting in a list of the best of them, but at the same time doesn’t quite have enough to contend for a top three slot.
Neveldine/Taylor are the combo directors who brought us the Crank franchise and spark a sense of life into the Ghost Rider franchise just for the heck of it all. They started out in Hollywood under the title of “extreme visual sequences creator” for the film Biker Boyz, it’s understandable that these men aren’t exactly here to just tell a mind bending tale but rather to wow us by overloading us with a special form of cinematic awesomeness that is all entirely their own. The question one will have to ask is whether that benefits or hinders the film? Sadly I believe it does a lot of both all at the same time.
Thanks to the directors the film plays a lot as its own reincarnation of the franchise as opposed to a straight up sequel. It adheres to all of the makings of a Ghost Rider story, and keeps all the things that we tried to love about the first film (ie. Nicolas Cage being a crazy guy and the fact that we have a bike on fire looking pretty sweet) and tries to revitalize everything else by stylizing everything to a point of overload almost.
Nicolas Cage plays his role as you want him to, in a manner that makes you not only question his sanity but also want to make an anonymous tip to the local authorities to search his premises for all sorts of drugs in hopes that it will lead him on the road of recovery, but in a good way. The good thing about that is that while by itself it provides enough (at this point intentional) humour for me to enjoy it still manages to stand out from the rest (rather pulp filled) of the film.
Where Neveldine/Taylor end up going wrong is where their style gets the better of them. There are a handful of scenes, usually the expository ones where they try their best to allow for the plot to push forward, where it’s obvious that they felt they had to try and follow some editing rhythm that just was too distracting for me. One particular scene which I recall is where Moreau (Idris Elba) first meets Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) and he fills him in on the world’s problems and almost every line of dialogue had an almost punch effect to them where they would immediately cut to a different angle which would also entail a zooming/moving shot of film which would then move to another. This, while cool in small doses, is infuriating at times because it brings too much attention to the fact that someone is purposefully doing this with a camera as opposed to organically making a story reveal itself to us and just letting us enjoy the fun of what a Nic Cage film is.
Where the film got it mostly right was with the action scenes of the Rider doing his thing. There are scenes edited purposefully but in a way that works. It adds elements of the setting slowly but surely while allowing for small moments of the Rider being showy that just happens to add the fun of the action movie that is a Ghost Rider movie. The effect does wear off after the second action scene, but I still enjoyed them bit to bit.