3) Ghost Rider
A guilty pleasure for some, it’s still hard to get around the fact that Ghost Rider is for the most part just noisy, flaming cinematic garbage. It’s easy to see why Nicolas Cage picked the role, as the screenplay gives him license to crank up the insanity factor to 11 for one of those over-the-top maniacal performances he appears to absolutely love. As an actor you can’t fault his energy, and for all his flops, going nuts on screen actually works for Cage perhaps every five or six films on average. Ghost Rider, unfortunately, is not one of those films.
Based on the Marvel comics antihero Johnny Blaze, who made a deal with the devil for his father’s well-being, Ghost Rider depicts Cage’s protagonist’s descent into the world of evil supernatural power. Filled with frenetic frames of flaming skulls and roaring souls, the movie gets tiring very quickly; never being as funny, cool or sporadically scary as it thinks it is.
Perhaps if it’d been handled either as thoughtful drama or visceral horror it might have worked, but instead the movie tries to be a little bit of everything, ultimately falling flat on its flaming face way before the rev counter has even hit the halfway mark.