15 Years Later: Ghost Rider

Director: Mark Steven Johnson
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Sam Elliott
Running time: 110 minutes

Cast your mind back to 2007. The superhero movie boom has yet to start, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe still a year away from hitting the silver screen. Comic book movies – particularly Marvel movies – weren’t the guaranteed critical and commercial success they have become, with standalone instalments appearing every few years before being panned, cast aside, never to be thought of again. Of course, we have the excellent Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, along with two Blade films (I refuse to acknowledge Blade: Trinity as movie that exists), but superhero entries like Daredevil, Hulk, and the reason you’re here, Ghost Rider, were always around the corner. Ghost Rider is close to being the nadir of the modern-day comic book movie, and yet there’s something so magnetic about how terrible it is.

Telling the story of Johnny Blaze, played by Nicolas Cage, a hotshot stunt bike rider who sells his soul to the Devil so he can save his cancer-ridden father. Any deal with the Devil is bound to go south, however, and Blaze’s father dies the following day in a stunt gone wrong. Years later, he finds himself as the titular Ghost Rider – a demonic entity tasked with carrying out the Devil’s bidding. When the Devil’s son, Blackheart, appears to claim a contract of souls which would see him turn Earth into his own personal hell, the Ghost Rider must save the world along with his girlfriend Roxanne, played by Eva Mendes. Now, I want you to read that paragraph again and count the times you roll your eyes, sigh, or feel a general sense of confusion at how batshit the experience sounds. Now think about doing that for 110 minutes, and you’ve experienced Ghost Rider as it was surely intended, because nothing can be as nonsensical as that by accident.

Bizarrely, though, it’s refreshing. I love the MCU, and I have a fondness for DC films. But there’s an undeniable cleanliness to them. Whatever story they tell, and whoever is behind the camera, underneath the different thematic touches, there’s a pervasive sense of... not quite perfection, but an inevitability that everything is being delivered in a neat package with a delicate bow on top. Ghost Rider is like having that parcel delivered by a disgruntled postal worker who’s just lobbed it in your general direction. It’s so overtly messy, the performances so wildly chaotic.

With the fifteen-year anniversary just around the corner, Ghost Rider is primed for a re-watch. Partly because of how different it feels to more modern iterations of the genre – not just for its lower quality, but for its balls to the wall commitment to being so bonkers. The other reason, however, is that we may be seeing Cage don his leathers once more. With where the MCU is heading as a multiversal saga along with the many cameos celebrating Marvel history in Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness, it cannot be ruled out. Norman Reedus seems likely to pick up the mantle down the proverbial road, but seeing Cage and his maniacal take on Blaze for one final ride would be treat. 

In the end, Ghost Rider isn’t great. Or good. Or frankly, even fine. It’s a dreadful mess of film, but you can’t take your eyes off it now, no different to fifteen years ago. It oozes personality in a way other bad movies simply do not. Of course, there are better films to revisit, but if you don’t crack at least one smile when you fire up Ghost Rider, I’ll sell my soul to the Devil as well.

Did you know? Nicolas Cage had to have his Ghost Rider tattoo covered with make-up to play Johnny Blaze.