The first Ghost Rider (2007) had soul, Peter Fonda, and a tongue-in-check performance from Nicolas Cage as the Marvel comic stunt rider who makes an ill-advised deal with the devil and becomes possessed by a demon. Dumb as it was, you had to laugh when, in moments of stress, Cage's rider transformed into a flaming skeleton. The follow up, cobbled together by the minimally named duo Neveldine/Taylor, who made the Crank films, hobbles Cage with a pedantic plot where the rider must locate the Devil's son before he turns 13 and takes over the earth. Even stalwart Ciarán Hinds, as Satan in the flesh, gets half-baked by the tedium. The filmmakers deliver some gorgeous landscape shots of Asia Minor and leverage the 3D perspective to good effect, but the time between such moments of relief can seem like an eternity of movie hell.
