It’s going to be hard to top this film as the worst film of 2012
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is the sequel to Ghost Rider, which also starred Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze. The sequel picks up where the original left off. Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) has decided to live a life in solitude far away from all civilization. This doesn’t last long, however, as Johnny soon gets a visit from Moreau (Idris Elba), who tells him that he must help save his son (who knew he even had one) and if he helps with this, Johnny’s reward will be having the devil’s curse lifted.
When I first heard about Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, I was at Comic Con in San Diego back in July of 2011. When I saw the huge banner, I began to shake my head as I remembered the original being extremely disappointing despite having one of the coolest and most bad ass comic book heroes. The movie was just bad all the way around from the story to the acting. It just wasn’t a good movie, but when the trailer premiered at Comic Con, I said wow this could be half way decent and boy, what a misleading idea that was.
I have seen a lot of bad movies over the past few years, I have survived The Sitter, Jack and Jill, and even the last two Transformers movies, but Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is by far one of the worst pieces of garbage that I have seen come out of Hollywood in several years. You may be asking yourself “Scott, how I could be so disappointed when the original was so mediocre?” Well, because I was actually fooled by the marketing campaign and truly believe that Nicolas Cage can be a solid actor (remember Adaptation & Matchstick Men) if he chooses his roles wisely.
The odd thing about Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is that its opening scene is actually decent because it gives the viewer an entire recap of how “the rider” came to be. The problem is about 5 minutes in the movie begins to crash and burn and never recovers. There aren’t enough words to describe how much I loathe this film. I think a bunch of 8 year old’s with a video camera can create, write, and act better than anything that can be found within this movie.
It’s hard to even begin to pick out what was wrong with this film so we will start with the easiest target: Nicolas Cage. Wow, I honestly haven’t seen such a shitty performance like this since Pauly Shore starred in Bio-Dome. It is clear that Nicolas Cage just did this movie for the money because he didn’t even try at all in this one. He almost seemed like a person with a mental disorder throughout most of it. He was always yelling and making strange facial movements. When he morphed into “the rider” it had to be some of the worst and most blatant attempts at overacting that I have ever seen in my life. I know a lot of people said that they can usually laugh at how bad Nicolas Cage is, but in this film he is so bad that I couldn’t even find humor in it. I just felt disgusted and robbed of my integrity when I exited the theater.
If you think Nicolas Cage is bad, you should see the rest of the cast. I think homeless people can add more depth and emotion to characters compared to anyone who stars in this film. Violante Placido, Ciarán Hinds, Idris Elba, Fergus Riordan and Christopher Lambert are just some of the cast members and each one is worse than the next. It really looked like everyone had no direction at all and where making up their lines on the spot.
Speaking of lack of direction, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were the two men behind the camera of this train wreck. The action sequences were extremely long, over the top, and frequently used the most annoying action sequence technique used today best known as “the slow motion shot.” The other thing about the direction was that the film at times looked like the directors ran out of budget and couldn’t use anymore CGI. There were so many scenes where it was just pure black in the background, which looked extremely bizarre and showed that no one really cared about the flick in post-production. I have heard many people label this film as a film that had solid direction, but to me it was piss poor direction. I don’t understand how anyone could watch this film and say well that direction was spot on and brilliant. It was the most chopped together film that made little to no sense at all.
Lastly, I have to talk about the script. This movie took three people to write it and it totally shows. It actually looked like one person wrote the first half, one person wrote the second half, and one person wrote in the filler scenes like the random voice over scenes with pictures of people like Jerry Springer that made no sense at all. The script jumped around more than a stripper at a bachelor party. It was so hard to follow and made no logical sense what so ever. This had to be one of the worst screenplays in recent years to be adapted into a feature length film and I am not joking.
In conclusion: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance could quite possibly be the worst film of 2012. It is going to definitely be a hard movie to top and that says a lot coming from someone who sees over 150 movies a year. This is hands down the worst Nicolas Cage performance I have ever seen and when he transforms into “the rider” he looks like he is having a seizure on screen, which is unfortunate for the audience because it’s just him overacting rather than him about to collapse from how bad the script for the film is. There is nothing good to say about the film at all other than the fact that “the rider” looked cool, but everything else was just one eye rolling scene after another. If they green light part 3 of this franchise, it better be a reboot because without it, I refuse to waste any more time on this franchise.
MovieManMenzel’s final rating for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a 1/10. It’s been a long time since I gave a film a 1, but this one is very worthy of the rating.
