Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is pretty much a reboot of the Ghost Rider franchise for those wondering. Why they had to reboot from the last movie i don’t understand, it wasn’t a terrible film, it was mindless fun, which is what i expected of a superhero film starring Nicholas Cage. But they did and this is the result.

THE ACTORS
Nicholas Cage is back and he is still hamming it up, but it kind of works for his role as Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider. Blaze is portrayed as a tortured soul who ultimately wants to do good, but when everyone on the planet has done something bad once in their life, the Ghost Rider has to come out and bring them to justice. Cage delivers on the tortured/unhinged character Johnny Blaze was supposed to be, albeit with some corny one liners and some clunky dialogue.

Idris Elba plays a drunk french priest. What more can i say? Well he wasn’t very good, the accent kept slipping in certain places and the dialogue as well as the delivery of said dialogue was very poor. I expected better from Elba, at least he kicked some ass.


Ciarán Hinds, Violante Placido (Fantastic name) and Johnny Whitworth gave acceptable performances but nothing that really stood out for me.

THE DIRECTORS
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the directors of Crank, were directing a Ghost Rider film. This raised my hopes substantially. In reality it shouldn’t have, because it was still Nick Cage, but i loved Crank.

Neveldine and Taylor do not disappoint, this film is shot amazingly. The camera angles are inventive, flowing and following the action. Even the dialogue heavy scenes are superbly shot. These guys could make a funeral look exciting and for that i commend their talent.

Yet for all the amazing shots, nothing could save this turd.

CONCLUSION
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has truly great action scenes which are shot fantastically. The action scenes are truly mile a minute type ventures, which get your heart pounding and keep you wanting more and more, yet it is the dialogue scenes and the story scenes where this film truly falls flat.

The script is very clunky and just doesn’t flow as smooth as it should and as such this film has some major pacing issues, which, considering it is barely over 90 mins, is very poor.

It doesn’t help that there is this huge build up to the big bad final boss which is anti-climactic. Sure, chasing him was fun and exciting, but when he is dealt with within the very minute he is caught, it feels as though there was a lot of wasted time attempting to build a story around him and his motivations.

So in conclusion, this film suffers with pacing issues, bad dialogue, average (at best) acting yet it also has some amazing action scenes which are shot and executed near perfectly. If you enjoyed the first Ghost Rider film, give this a chance, if you didn’t, well it is just more of the same, even the villains are almost identical.

MY SCORE
6/10