Ghost Rider Movie Review

The devil's bounty hunter in black leather on a fiery motorcycle; narration by Sam Elliott; Nick Cage as your leading man; Peter Fonda playing the devil; twenty-five years of source material to work from: What could possibly go wrong? Mark Steven Johnson -- screenwriter/director/the rain which turns your favorite comics into mush in your trembling twelve-year-old hands after you've walked twenty-two blocks to the comic book store and waited in line behind the thirty-year-old fat guy who apparently subsists only on burritos from seven-eleven, when you know you don't have enough allowance left to by another one, and besides if you did all they had left was Asterix comics, and who reads Asterix comics anyway except for bored ten-year-old Swedish boys who can't get any on the longest night of the year. Johnson, you stinker.

The narration begins, and so do the problems. "Sometimes there's a man, and I'm talking about the dude here" Wait, that was a good movie; that intro made sense. Ghost Rider, on the other hand, begins with the legend of the Ghost Rider, a cursed man doomed to act as the devil's bounty hunter - fair enough. However, the story then digresses into the Ghost Rider acting as the devil's collections agency - annoyingly chasing down overdue souls, interrupting you during dinner to ask if you've received your cable bill, reminding you that your rental movie is three days past due.

The main collection of the movie is 1,000 souls over 150 years past due (must be government-subsidized, because they are not collecting any interest (in any sense of the word). For some unexplained reason, the devil wants these; so does his son. The entire plot begs the question: How slowly is the devil collecting souls that 1,000 makes a real difference over the course of 150 years? With over 6 billion on the planet, that gives the devil a batting average of about one soul in six million. Seems like he would be better off with fewer bounty hunters and more door-to-door salesmen, or more talk radio slots.