Ghost RiderWithout Cage, an infernal flame-out  February 21,
2007 6:01:34 PM
If Nicolas Cage weren’t a goofball with a hunky physique and droll wit, this Marvel-comic-to-big-screen adaptation would have no torque at all. He plays a heralded stunt cyclist (à la Evel Knievel) tricked into a bogus deal with the Devil. Upstaging said Devil (Mr. Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda) as the baddest guy on screen is Blackheart (Wes Bentley), his son, who wants to invoke the End of Days. That gives Cage’s Johnny Blaze plenty of opportunity to transform into the Rider of the title, a flaming skeleton atop a hell-bent Harley who issues Hulk-like inanities while laying down his wrath with a steel chain turned impromptu whip. Eva Mendes and Sam Elliott fill in as love interest and mentor, respectively, and director Mark Steven Johnson improves on his last outing, Elektra, but without Cage, he’d have little more than an infernal flame-out.
|
 |
|
- Inside the prize-filled trophy home of a seemingly obsessive-compulsive contest enterer
- The Boston Police investigation of Stephan Cowans led to a wrongful conviction. Was it incompetent — or corrupt?
- In the Granite State, the McCain mystique is alive and well
- Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
- Dirty pictures
- Win or lose, Obama's small donors may have already brought a revolution in campaign financing
- Inside the prize-filled trophy home of a seemingly obsessive-compulsive contest enterer
- The Boston Police investigation of Stephan Cowans led to a wrongful conviction. Was it incompetent — or corrupt?
- The ‘poet’s poet’ gets canonized
- Cheaper and brighter, but with all its old virtues intact
- Why, in desperate times, we turn to lolcats, twee songs, and mute kittens
- Hopped-up brews are proliferating in Rhode Island, from neighborhood bars to the corner package store
|
-
Oodles of fun
-
Inadvertent camp
-
No pulse
-
A humorless turd
-
Righteous and garden-fresh
-
Silly confusion
-
Cheap and flimsy
-
Taut, but the pieces don't fit
-
A fruitcake of a film
-
A call to action
|
- Sort of crap
- Torture in the shadows
- The hawk is AIDS
- It seems, you had to be there
- Disinterestedly coughed up
- Lazy, lazy, lazy
- Total makeover madness
- Oodles of fun
- Two directers and still unoriginal
- Love, loniliness, aging, and bad hair
|
|
|
|